Then they fall quiet again, and the gynecologist confronts the silence with his hands on the steering wheel, as if he were driving in the rain. His hands once more. The young American thinks that hands are badly designed—there are too many fingers on them. They’d be much more stylish with one finger fewer. Stick characters in comics only have four fingers. If you’re going to take one finger away, which one is it going to be? Abaitua is sure about it. The fourth one, the one next to the longest finger, the one that’s only any good for wearing a ring, and for once, the young sociologist disagrees with him. How could a doctor say that? He finds the exaggerated way she shows her surprise comical, her mouth wide open and her hands on her cheeks. The finger that he says is useless, the one called the ring finger in many languages, in Spanish, for instance, is magical: the one on the left hand is connected to the heart via the vena amoris. The s in amoris whistles when she says it. The finger you use for mixing drinks. Apparently, that’s why it doesn’t have a name in several other languages—Bulgarian, Sanskrit, Turkish. People are afraid of it, because it’s magical, because it has powers. And particularly in Eastern cultures, in Japanese, for instance, but in German, as well, and Hungarian, it’s called the healing finger, or the medicine or doctor’s finger, digitus medicinalis. In English it’s called the ring finger, and also the leech finger, and because the gynecologist doesn’t know the meaning of “leech,” the well-educated American sociologist explains it means sanguijuela and that it’s also “an archaic word for physicians,” though she doesn’t want to offend him—he’s also a doctor.
The well-read doctor didn’t know any of that, but he isn’t embarrassed by the young American uncovering his cultural ignorance. Quite the contrary—he’s pleased to be with a cultured woman who’s studied things. What’s more, the American sociologist, for her part, doesn’t know that this particular finger, which is so overvalued in other languages and is only any good for wearing rings, is called hatz nagia in Basque. Perezoso, he clarifies in Spanish. “Lazy,” if that’s the right word. He ventures the theory that in the past, when doctors didn’t wash their hands, they used the digitus magicus to stir their drinks and, in that way, there was less risk of them then putting it into their mouths or any other inappropriate holes than if they had used more skillful fingers. As far as the young sociologist knows, the term “weak finger” or “lazy finger” isn’t used in any other language, and the seriousness with which she says she finds his theory interesting makes him doubt whether she really does.
Digitus nagia gives them a lot to talk about. Speaking of digitus annularis, Harri Gabilondo has warned the young woman about men in the Basque Country who wear rings. It seems that Basque men in general do not like superfluous ornaments and look down on wedding rings in particular. Abaitua agrees that’s right, and he says that rings were considered ostentatious, more appropriate for Eastern countries and Spanish civil servants, or, more precisely, for secret policemen wearing sunglasses and moustaches. And he tends to agree. What’s more, ringless fingers are a sign of noble work; rings not only get in the way but are also dangerous, although that isn’t the main reason why Iñaki Abaitua doesn’t wear one.
Pilar doesn’t wear a wedding ring, either, and they had to use rings lent to them by other people when they got married. That’s what they were like at the time. Back then they rejected marriage, because it was a fundamental bourgeois institution; apparently Marx had said it was another way of prostituting yourself, a source of subjugations and boredom. He points at a large white building with a small bell tower on top of a slate roof. That’s where they were married, in the chapel at his father-in-law’s clinic. It was practically a clandestine wedding, only immediate family attending. Because they got married without conviction, giving way to the circumstances, marrying in order to avoid having to break off from the family, or at least to avoid causing too much of a fuss, because it was the only way for them to live together as a couple. All those old people—widowed old men and women who now live together but remain unmarried in order not to lose the right to continue drawing both their pensions and who boast about how much they enjoy themselves at retired people’s dances and on day trips and watching filth on the television—used to be inflexible with young people who wanted to live together without getting married and demanded that they comply strictly with the moral norms in force. He admits he resents it. As far as the young people of the time were concerned, they were obedient when it came down to it, although in order to protect their dignity—and, to an extent, the illusion that they weren’t getting married completely—they would insist on getting married in shrines on far-off hilltops and on the officiators being absentminded priests, priests who didn’t completely want to be priests and who, later on, became more and more secular, priests who helped them dispense with the paraphernalia that today’s young people seem to love. They were able to preserve their informality, so to speak, and they tended to eschew wedding rings, gifts, banquets, and honeymoons, just as Pilar and he had done. They thought they’d be able to escape that way from the institutions they hated and that had made their parents unhappy. But they were wrong about that, as they found out before too long. However, they continued pretending that they believed themselves to be free and, except with themselves, with each other, they compromised on everything else. Protective when it came to their false freedom, they put their commitment to each other to one side, and their false sense of dignity, emotional clumsiness, and supposed authenticity—in other words, taking everything other than vulgarity to be no more than bourgeois hypocrisy—made it impossible for them to do anything that would give meaning to their life together.
He’s had the impression for some time now that Pilar blames him for making her challenge her father (among other things, with the type of wedding they had in the clinic’s chapel), for distancing her from her old friends because they were right-wing rich kids, and, in the end, for leading a conventional bourgeois lifestyle that wasn’t so different from theirs. “No necesitaban alforjas para ese viaje,” would be the Spanish way to describe it.
He doubts whether the young American is understanding him clearly now, because he’s stopped making an effort to speak slowly or to avoid double meanings and tricky expressions. He doesn’t know how to explain the expression no necesitar alforjas para ese viaje—literally “not needing saddlebags for the trip,” it’s a way to explain that someone needn’t have expended so much energy on an endeavor, something like saying “for all the good it did”—but at least they have a laugh when he tries to get her to pronounce it properly. He even has trouble explaining what the alforja—the saddlebag—is.
And with that, he forgets what they were talking about.
Wedding rings. The young woman reaches out toward the windshield, showing off the back of her hand. She doesn’t wear rings, either. In her case, she says, it’s in order not to draw attention to her hands. They’re too small, she says with resignation. She has very white skin, and her nails are shiny, but he doesn’t think she uses nail polish. She has such delicate hands that her joints are highly visible. “They aren’t surgeon’s hands, are they?” There’s no such thing as surgeon’s hands, he says, without adding that her hands are pretty. As far as he remembers, he’s never seen Pilar with painted nails, either, and her hands aren’t the best part of her anatomy. But she does wear rings, though not always. He remembers she has one with a light-violet-colored stone, and another with a green one. And she has a diamond ring, as well, which is a family jewel, and must be worth a lot. But she’s never worn a wedding ring. A few years ago, not so long ago, during one of their reconciliatory romantic moments, he decided to buy her the wedding ring he hadn’t gotten her back in the day, and he chose one randomly, one that didn’t look too big or too small, having gone into a jewelers on impulse without having taken a ring from her jewelry box as a model. He didn’t get to see if he picked out the size right or not, because she didn’t even try it on. “A bit too late.” That was
all she said about it. Pilar doesn’t trust expressions of affection, just like Abaitua’s mother. He’s occasionally seen the wedding ring sitting in her open jewelry box.
But he doesn’t remember the date of their wedding. Not the day, the month, or the year. It was a winter day, or late fall, because Pilar can be seen in a photo that one of the nuns at the clinic took wearing a coat with a fur collar half hiding her face—a very poor photo. He’s often been surprised by Pilar saying “We got married so many years ago today.” She gets disappointed about it. He’s always thought that she minds too much about him forgetting dates, because she isn’t one of those women who are very sensitive about details; in fact, he would say it’s easy to overdo things with her, to appear to be overly buttery, but now he knows that she takes not remembering certain dates to be a sign of a lack of respect, and she accuses him of not being interested. And she’s right, although he’s never seen it that way. His argument is that not remembering the date doesn’t mean that he’s forgotten the day—he remembers it well. He doesn’t know what year his son was born, either, but he remembers very well that it was raining on the day he was born, and nobody could say he doesn’t love him, he might even love him too much, in fact. But he has to admit that he does know just a few dates by heart: July 18, 1936; August 31, 1813; April 14, 1931; July 14, 1789; and September 27, 1975. He knows that Pilar’s birthday is on the anniversary of the night before the storming of the Bastille, but he has to calculate the year—she’s nine years younger than he is. It’s true that he hasn’t made any effort to remember the date of their wedding, and that could be a sign of negligence, or of something worse still, the desire to forget about it—that’s probably what she thinks. In any case, when he admits now that he doesn’t know how many years he’s been married, he wouldn’t like the young American to understand that he, like so many men, is proud of being clumsy and careless, one of those married men who considers himself a bachelor, and so he insists it’s because of his bad memory, a shortcoming that may be linked to his poor orientation, but it’s obvious he also leaves it open for her to interpret that his forgetting the day of his wedding is because it’s a bad memory for him. And yet there is nothing further from his mind than speaking ill of Pilar. And he hates that frequently employed male strategy of attracting women’s attention by securing their pity, men explaining their misfortunes to that end.
Where did you meet? At the hospital?
When they were both students. They met at the start of one summer, at the Zaragoza train station, the day before he was going to leave behind the city where he got his degree in medicine forever. He had gone there to check in several suitcases stuffed with his university books, and she’d gone there with a large group of friends to meet someone. He knew her by sight, she was so beautiful it was impossible not to notice her—the best-looking girl in the department—and somebody told him she was the daughter of a Donostian obstetrician who owned a private clinic. They never had any contact in the year they both spent in Zaragoza; she hung out with the rich kids and didn’t ever cross paths with him and his friends in the places where they used to go to drink small glasses of wine and sing traditional songs like “Boga Boga.” One of those girls you didn’t just go up to, and in any case, she was much younger than him. But that day at the station, it was she who left her group and came up to him. He remembers her perfectly. In a short, beltless dress that stuck to her belly a little bit and had long or three-quarter length sleeves, she moved her arms freely, swinging them a little, which almost made her seem a little forward (it was very unusual to see girls not carrying bags back then), almost challenging, marking each pace clearly with her shoulders and hips, and when she stopped a couple of feet from him, she asked him in Spanish if he was going back to Donostia. They didn’t even know each other’s names. “¿Vas a Sanse?” He hates that abbreviation for San Sebastián, and he hated it even more just then, thinking it a word typical of the group of fools standing behind her in a semicircle and looking on with curiosity and amusement. He said he was going back the next day, and she suggested taking him in their car—they had a free spot. “You can come with us.” Later on she admitted that the girls in the group had pointed him out and that she’d gone up to him as a bet; although she looked daring, she’d actually been very embarrassed just then, and even afraid that he might refuse her invitation in front of her friends.
She was known for being very lively, and they called her by the nickname, Piluca. A ridiculous name. He sometimes calls her that, Piluca, when he wants to tease her. He also teases her because she was wearing such a short dress, it stopped several spans above her knees, and Pilar is amazed that he remembers it so well—pistachio green with a square neckline—and she explained that she used to wear either very short skirts or very long ones, almost down to her ankles in order to cover up her knees, which she doesn’t like. Perhaps they are quite wide, they’re strong, and she has a wrinkle above each kneecap and a soft fold in her skin that looks like something left over from her infancy. He loves that fold, which is a soft as a child’s skin.
The young American’s legs are quite different from Pilar’s. Her knees, in particular, with their small, defined kneecaps, are nowhere near as rounded as Pilar’s; they are precise, and he likes that. And her calf muscles are very well developed, her rectus femur above all, and it forms a curve that’s visible up to her knees. He likes that distinguishing characteristic, which his grandfather’s generation wouldn’t have cared for much. On the other hand, they would have liked her skin, because it’s completely white, and the golden down that shines on it, also completely white. She says she cycles a lot, that’s why she has well-developed calves. She passes her thin-fingered hands over her cyclist’s thighs, and Abaitua is afraid she might have seen him looking at them. He would be incredibly hurt if she took him to be one of those dirty old men that sneak surreptitious glances at thighs and necklines. So he tries to seem natural and give his words the air of some technical finding when he says she has well-developed muscles, and she answers, also in a wholly natural way, and leaning back a little so that he can see them better, that perhaps they are over-developed. Too much cycling.
Abaitua prefers hiking. He says that he often goes to the Pyrenees to do stretches of the GR-11 trail with that friend of his. The stretches of the trail that are in the Basque Country, which is the area he likes best. Not out of patriotism, he feels compelled to say, but because the mountains here aren’t as high, they’re forested and gentler. The real mountains start further east, with their bare rock faces, and he finds them more challenging. They normally stay at a small hotel, there’s a nice one in Donibane Garazi, the Arrambide family’s Hôtel des Pyrénées, and they spend their days in the hills eating only nuts, dried fruit, and oranges, and in the evening they feast on substantial dinners. Perhaps too substantial. He admits that he sometimes has difficulty dragging Kepa up to the hills, and more than once he’s had to set off by himself, leaving his friend sitting at an outdoor café reading a book, because he prefers car trips, visiting unusual places, eating well, and sitting outside reading to hiking. He illustrates his point with a few details he thinks are amusing. The girl, at any rate, laughs happily at his descriptions of himself—alone and unable to find his way on the mountain paths, completely lost.
“You are a fortunate man.” The young woman in the novel also often says “you are a fortunate man” to the old writer. More than the declaration itself, he’s surprised by how seriously she says it, the depth of the young American’s feeling when she speaks the phrase, and when he asks her why, she says, “Don’t know, I just think so,” but gives him no other answer, it’s just the impression she has.
He wonders if he shouldn’t turn the engine off.
The American girl says she’s heard that the northern Basque Country is very beautiful. She wants to go there. He could reply that he’ll take her there whenever she likes, but he doesn’t think it very sensible, and what’s more, almost as so
on as she says it, almost without pause, she says herself that she’s planning to go there. “I will go,” she says with great conviction, which leads him to think that she isn’t looking for someone to take her. And much less an old doctor, the father of a son that he knows is the same age as she is, even though he doesn’t remember his exact birthday. They had the boy late in life, very late in life—it’s complicated to explain the reasons for that, and it would involve mentioning Pilar’s bicornuate uterus—and because of that, his son is younger than is normal for a man of his age.
“Does your son look like you?”
“Do the two of you get on well?”
“What does he do?”
“Would you like to have had a daughter?”
On other occasions, too, he’s gotten the impression that it’s easier to tell foreigners intimate things. For one thing, you care less about what they may think about you and about what they might do with the information you’re giving them. For another, you feel protected by their limited understanding, because you think that they won’t comprehend everything you say or that they’ll take things you put badly to be the result of their own problems of understanding. Something like when you stay up late drinking.
Martutene Page 27
