Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  They didn’t speak for a long time after that, and she never had another appointment with Abaitua again.

  The young American, too, thinks the story about the bar is beautiful, the old Irish people joining in with the young Basques. She asks Julia to sing the song. She no longer remembers all the lovely, nostalgic Basque songs she once used to sing so emotionally, but she thinks she can remember this one. She works up her courage, takes the young woman by the hand, and leads her to the piano. She hasn’t played for a long time and hasn’t sung for even longer. “Ixilik dago tantai gañean / lengo txori berritsuba / lumatxo bigun arro tartean / gorderik bere buruba.” She can’t carry on, because her voice breaks, she just plays the piano part, and after a few moments lets that fade out, as well.

  Through the French windows, she can see a gigantic yellow machine, it looks like some military thing, that’s throwing spurts of cement down a chute and onto what had been a soft field. She sheds a tear and can do nothing to hide it. Lynn is looking at her, her eyes bright, her chin resting on her arms, which are crossed on top of the piano. “It’s really beautiful,” she says, putting her hand on the hand Julia has left resting on the piano lid. The girl’s hands have very long fingers and short nails. Then she says she thinks they’re going to be good friends, and Julia takes her hand away when she sees the writer in the yard. Zigor is sitting at the kitchen table, and his grandmother is behind him, by the window, ironing. Julia had to stand there for a long time before they realized that she was there. They’ve been deeply immersed in a discussion about the civil war. Perhaps the mother is jealous because her son’s had to go to the old people’s home to find someone to talk with. Someone, it’s clear, has been telling him bad things about the nationalists. They hesitated too much about which side to join during the war, they spent all their time saving right-wing informers, and then they fled as deserters to Asturias, which is something that Julia’s mother will not accept at all. She says that the patriots had to fight on two fronts at the same time, against Franco’s Nationals in front of them and against the Reds in the rearguard, and the Reds committed all sorts of terrible crimes. They burned down Irun. As far as their surrendering was concerned, they did the right thing—the war in Euskadi had already been lost, because the Republic had stopped sending arms and planes.

  She’s told her hundreds of time that she shouldn’t iron the sheets.

  The gudaris were great guys, noble and honorable. She says the Reds who were in Otzeta used to wear their caps tilted to one side, they were proud, arrogant, always on the lookout for a fight, and they used to steal cars to go out drinking.

  She was employed in a workshop where they made clothes for the soldiers, close to Gernika and a long way from home, when the Nationals took Otzeta. Sometimes, when they talk about that period, she says they were some of the happiest times of her life. Julia and her sister have sometimes wondered whether she might have had a boyfriend back then, but they haven’t ever managed to clear that one up. She doesn’t mention matters of much importance—what they used to eat, perhaps, or how they organized their work. She saw the bombing, but what she says about it is nothing near as bad as what Julia has seen about it at the cinema. Zigor’s generation has seen the giant mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, the flayed Vietnamese girl, and the Gernika bombing has become, objectively, a small-scale tragedy. While she changes clothes in her bedroom, she hears what her mother is saying, almost whispering. She knows she’s going to tell him at some point about the woman carrying her child away from the bombing wrapped in a blanket and suddenly realizing that he’s dead. She doesn’t know if her mother ever actually saw that scene herself, but the image is so well assimilated that she probably feels as if she did. Terrifying. The boy keeps quiet—his grandmother’s firsthand story conveys fear, and not even the best cinematic special effects could compete with her.

  He must think what his grandfather did during the war was incredible. That’s what Julia thought, as well, when her father used to talk about it. Zigor asks her to tell him her version of it when she goes into his room to say goodnight, but as could only be expected, right now he only has ears for what his grandmother has just told him. He was the first person in the neighborhood to volunteer with the nationalists. They were sent to the Loiola basilica for their training, and there were thousands of young men there, all of them cleaning and decorating the church, and as her father used to proudly say, not so much as a single chalice ever went missing. Their first action in the war was to take a hill, whose name he didn’t remember. According to her father, they crawled forward, and then, when they were nearly at the top, perhaps growing overconfident and no longer keeping so close to the ground, they were caught by machine gun fire and had to run back down the hill. Many lost their lives, and those who got away were scattered. He was wounded in the ankle and, along with some others, was taken in at a nearby baserri. They gave them bread and milk and let them spend the night in the barn, but the next morning, the Falangists woke them up and took them prisoner. The farmer had given them up. The first tricky issue: coming to terms with the fact that a Basque farmer had been the informant, which went against the nobility and loyalty that her father said were characteristic of the Basque race. They should have been executed, but luckily, the battalion or whatever it was that had caught them was led by a colonel from the Erribera area of southern Navarre, a gentleman Falangist, a drinker and a ladies’ man, but a good man, who saved their lives and took them with him to Aramendia, withdrawing them from the front to rest. The colonel’s name was Munuzabal, and he used to spend the summer in Martutene. He liked Julia’s father and arranged for him to be sent to the kitchen as a cook, so he spent the war eating and drinking as much as he wanted. The second difficult question: Being an enthusiastic nationalist volunteer, why didn’t he just poison the whole battalion? Julia thinks that’s the question the boy is asking himself now, and it’s one she would also like to know the answer to, but she never dared to ask her father. In any case, her intuition tells her that the wars you see in movies are nothing like the real ones. The third problem: how to believe the strange, absurd act of bravery that her mother’s just told Zigor about. Once, Munuzabal ordered him to come before him. It was after lunch, the colonel had had a lot to drink, and apparently he asked him, “So, Inaxio, if José Antonio Aguirre came here tonight and asked you to hide him, what would you do?” Her father’s version was that he said he would have hidden him. It would seem the same thing happened more than once, and apparently her father never changed his answer, he always said the same thing. When the northern campaign finished, he returned to his old neighborhood along with the Falangists, which astonished everybody—they thought he was dead, they’d even held a funeral for him. He said that he’d saved a lot of lives by stealing informant reports from the offices—he literally ate them—and that he’d alleviated a lot of people’s hunger by secretly handing out food he snuck back out of the warehouse after it had been confiscated in raids. After the war, Munuzabal wanted to give him a job with the Falange, but he didn’t accept it, and he even refused to let the man help him buy a boat as he’d offered to. Munuzabal liked him so much that he turned up the day her parents got married in Otzeta—nobody knew how he found out where and when the wedding was to be held—and, to her father’s great embarrassment, gave him a big gift. The last part’s definitely true, she’s heard her aunts and uncles say so, and they couldn’t have made it up. Her sister also remembers, or at least she says she remembers, that the colonel’s sisters used to come and visit them when she was very small—the man was still a drunk, a ladies’ man, and a bachelor, of course—and that they wanted to take them back with them to their house in southern Navarre, but their father never let them. Later on they lost touch.

  Her mother asks her to help fold the sheets. She thinks it’s just an excuse; her mother doesn’t like her talking alone with the boy about the war. Julia sees her eyes are red. It seems she’s just heard that the heir of Etxezar has
sold off the last bit of the pine grove for next to nothing.

  6

  Abaitua is examining his teeth and gums in the mirror. The necks of some of them are eroded, on some of the incisors in particular, and he thinks one of the fillings in his wisdom teeth may be broken. He thinks there’s no more significant sign of decay than losing your teeth, and he’s always been frightened by the idea of it, ever since he had one of his wisdom teeth extracted when he was still very young. In fact, advances in orthodontic treatments have been a great relief for him, and at times like now, when he’s looking at his teeth in the mirror, he thinks that the most positive thing about living in the time period that he does is that when he eventually has to, he’ll be able to make use of those techniques. Because he has the economic means to do so, of course. He’s quite sure that the cruelest reflection of the difference between social classes can be seen in people’s teeth. In any case, he’s less worried by the slackness of his eyelids, which almost completely cover his eyes in the morning, than he is by his teeth. Pilar has sometimes comforted him, without trying to deny the basic evidence, by saying that the bathroom mirror is particularly cruel. And it’s true, perhaps because the mirror’s a high quality one or because of the lighting—the bathroom lights are powerful—and there are other mirrors that are more amenable than the one at home, ones that show fewer details.

  “Do you know what?” says Pilar.

  The decorator who’s redoing the bathroom has told her that there’s a clear trend in modern homes toward integrating different things in the same room without any partitions, and apparently restrooms, too, are being left open, without any doors. Abaitua thinks it’s an obscene feature of contemporary culture, which values naturalness excessively, but he doesn’t answer her.

  He spends a quarter of an hour cleaning his teeth. Two minutes with spurts of water; three minutes with dental floss; two minutes with his normal toothbrush; four uses of the electric toothbrush (it restarts automatically every two minutes), two per quadrant, eight minutes total. Pilar says he’s going to wear them down. She doesn’t use a toothbrush herself, only floss and an electric brush, and her teeth are perfect.

  Pilar’s left the car in front of the garage door, she hasn’t parked it inside, again. Pilar, who is so careful about most things, is incomprehensibly lazy and careless about a few. She seldom closes screw-top jars completely, she often leaves the refrigerator door open, and she never parks the car in the garage.

  There wouldn’t be any problem about checking the underside of the car today, there’s nobody around, but he’s not going to. He’s going to be firm about not continuing that senseless ritual.

  While he’s signing prescriptions, the nurse tells him that the night before, when he was in the operating theater, the American girl who left her file folder behind the day before came to collect it but even though she looked everywhere, she couldn’t find it, and so she had to leave without it. “But she’s sure to come back,” she says, as if she were already well acquainted with what the young woman is like. She also tells him that Villar, the traumatologist, is going to marry a younger woman. He himself is a couple of years older than Villar. “As he should,” he says, pulling her leg. “If he’s going to get married, he’s not going to marry someone older than himself!” The nurse is unmarried, around fifty, fat, and she has red veins on her face that give away her intense social life. He thinks she probably hates men, and she often says that men can get fat and go bald without any repercussions while women have to starve themselves and are condemned to doing tai-chi.

  Pilar sometimes says to him—and he doesn’t know to what extent it’s a joke—that he should find himself a young woman so that he can have the daughter he’s never had. It would rejuvenate him. What she says about a daughter is true; he’s often said, jokingly, that he’d like to have one to look after him when he’s old. On the other hand, he isn’t one of those mature men who are attracted to younger women, and he finds it revolting when men of his age make jokes and say dirty things about young women who could be their daughters or even granddaughters. In his case, the taboo of incest protects all women who could, in terms of their age, be his daughters, and consequently, he doesn’t see them as objects of desire.

  He’s never linked beauty with youth, and in any case, a woman isn’t attractive for him just because she’s young. He remembers that when he was a boy and he’d hear people say that no women were ugly at the age of twenty—he’d even heard his father trot out the cliché—it always seemed absurd to him, because there were ugly twenty-year-olds, even very ugly ones, in fact. Of course he does appreciate certain features that are associated with youth, though not exclusively, such as soft skin, bright eyes, fresh lips in particular, but in themselves they’re not enough to make a woman attractive for him. In fact, there are even some features of maturity, of decline even, that he doesn’t necessarily find disagreeable, that can even be attractive depending on the woman’s intelligence and personality: slack breasts, which can suggest generosity and desire; a sensual, broken voice, which can express experience; and tired eyes, which can transmit understanding, knowing, and calmness. There are many women of his own age who seem much more attractive to him than many younger women. The nurse doesn’t believe him.

  ¿Llegaré a comer el turrón? On being given a bad diagnosis, some people use that expression—literally an enquiry into their chances of ever getting to taste turrón, the ubiquitous Christmas sweet, again in their lifetime—as a way of asking him how long they have left, and they probably aren’t the ones who take it the worst. He says yes to the woman who’s just asked him, but he doesn’t think she’ll last more than a year. A lively woman of forty who has a tumor that’s spread extensively, a stupid husband, and two adolescent daughters who have no clue what’s happening. Abaitua doesn’t know if he has the most appropriate face for these occasions; he worries that he may explain things too gravely, coming across as being hieratic and cold.

  But even so, he prefers erring on the side of sobriety. He knows that patronizing behavior is an even worse risk. And being the way he is, what most concerns him is accurately reflecting the severity of a given situation. What can a patient in need expect from some anxious, tormented caregiver like Van Gogh’s Doctor Gachet? As well as prolonging their remaining time and ensuring the best quality of life possible, someone should teach these people to live out the rest of the time they’ve been dealt calmly. Without suffering, without hurting themselves. Aided not by volunteers—everyone knows that professionals work for money, but who knows what’s motivating volunteers?—but by well-trained, competent healthcare professionals.

  There’s a bad smell in the room, coming from the carcinoma in the patient’s cervix. When Abaitua comes in, the person accompanying the patient, her sister, steps out without greeting him. To get some fresh air. The patient feels no pain, she still enjoys food and, quite significantly, defecates every morning. The problem is the bad smell and the fact that the sick woman is aware that the people who spend time with her are always counting the minutes, waiting to go outside, to escape into the real world. Abaitua stands by her bedside for longer than he really needs to precisely for that reason, so that she doesn’t think he also wants to get away from her. It’s a useless sacrifice, and because of that, he isn’t proud of it.

  As he unbuttons her blouse, he remembers the young woman who suddenly opened her sweater and she that said she was lactating. This time it’s a mature woman, and in this case she does have a hypophyseal tumor. Operations always involve some risk, but this one’s fairly straightforward. It’s extracted through the nose. He explains it to her with a sketch. She asks if he’s going to do the operation; it seems she trusts him. He says no, it’s an operation for a neurosurgeon, and he’ll be assisted by an ENT surgeon, but they’ll look after her well and there won’t be any difficulties.

  At the door of the pediatric ICU, Iñaki Echevarría—the fat resident doctor who spells his last na
me with ch and a v—asks him what he’s up to. He jokes that he’s “checking on the results of the havoc we wreak in the world,” and he thinks of Minkowski, who used to say that it would be a good thing if obstetricians and midwives visited the incubator ward from time to time so that they could see what the results of their exploits in the birthing room can sometimes turn out to be. Of course, the fat guy hasn’t even heard of Minkowski. He tells him how there used to be a time when pediatricians didn’t visit the maternity ward until twenty-four hours after a birth, because they thought that newborn babies were as much of an adjunct to their mothers as the placenta was. The first neonatologist to step into this hospital was Rodriguez Alarcón. The head of obstetrics let him come in because he was a nice guy and, more than anything else, because he used to tell great jokes, but he wasn’t allowed to touch anything, until one day there was a difficult twin birth in which, as the saying goes, even the father’s life was at risk, and it became necessary to put one of the newborn babies into the neonatologist’s hands. Once the problem was solved, the head of the service was honest enough to admit that their reanimation techniques had become outdated and that it could be very useful to have a pediatrician specialized in newborns physically present in the birthing room. It’s obvious the fat resident doctor isn’t impressed by any of this.