Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  It’s obvious that he’s noticed she’s angry, even though he’s pretending he hasn’t. He apologizes, even though he has no need to, by saying that the table was on sale, a real bargain, and that it will be good for them, running after loose balls will help them to lose some weight around their middles. She laughs. For him, nothing would be worse than the penthouse girl turning up and finding them in the middle of a quarrel, and because of that, she’s tempted—not really tempted, but she does think of it—to kick up a big fuss about him bringing this new object into the house in front of the girl. It would make him sick. He would do anything to avoid having others noticing that they’re angry at each other, and there’s no way he could have a couple’s argument with a third person there, either, not even if it were Harri. And Julia has to admit that she’s sometimes taken advantage of this fact to put him in a difficult situation, because she finds it easier to have others notice her bad mood than to keep her anger in check. It’s a matter of character, she thinks, and also of upbringing.

  Martin, relieved, asks her why she’s laughing, and Julia laughs more, reminded of a certain anecdote. “You have no idea,” she says to him, leaving him with the Ping-Pong table and paddles. She’s just remembered a quarrel that her cousin Koldo and his wife had. Martin knows the story well and has sometimes told it himself, as an example of the open nature of coastal people. Koldo’s wife, being deaf, uses a hearing aid. But she turns it off when they quarrel, and that really annoys her husband, who then shouts every insult he can think of at her. Her cousin himself told her about it. Once, while he was shouting, his wife asked him to be quiet, otherwise all the neighbors would hear everything. “What will Don Hipolito say?” she asked—Don Hipolito was the village priest and lived on the floor above them—and her cousin, opening the window, absolutely furious, like a storm breaking over the sea, mocked the neighbors and the priest with a passion, it was impossible to shut him up, until he decided of his own accord that he was finished. “Don Hipolito can go to hell!” was what he shouted. Apparently, the next day he had to go and apologize to the priest, and he said the priest was quite understanding—these things happen from time to time, he said.

  Tempus fugit. Her father often used the Latin quote, in a completely natural way and always appropriately—it seemed a sign of wisdom to Julia, and she was disappointed when she noticed it inscribed on the face of the clock in the dining room that they looked at so infrequently—and recently, without knowing why, she’s started saying it, as well. It’s taking her too long to translate Bihotzean, because in addition to the difficulty of the work itself—and it is difficult—she has a tendency to lose herself in her own thoughts about each clause without ever reaching any conclusions. As far as the writer is concerned, although he turns his computer on, he seldom spends more than two minutes sitting down in front of it. He gets up to go to the bathroom all the time, and to go upstairs, as well, though he tries to hide it from her; she thinks he goes up there to spy on the penthouse girl, to make sure she doesn’t slip out down the tower stairs without going through the house. In fact, she regrets being mean to him on one occasion, asking him, on one of his reappearances from the bathroom, if he realized how much hair he’s losing. “You shouldn’t comb it so much.” She could have said anything to him, even that it had forced her to clean around the foot of the toilet bowl again. The man ran both hands through his hair gloomily and told her he’d already gone to the skin specialist. “He told me I wouldn’t die bald.” Julia knew what would come after his short, forced laugh. He didn’t know if he meant that he didn’t have much hair but that it was going to last a while yet, or that he wasn’t going to have time to go bald because he was going to die soon.

  The penthouse girl at last. Martin goes up to her to tell her he’s bought a Ping-Pong table. “I have a surprise for you,” he says, leading her by the arm into the library, even though the young woman doesn’t look particularly interested. But she doesn’t have much choice, and she thinks getting a Ping-Pong table’s a good idea—it’s a great sport. That’s what she says, but without much enthusiasm, to the writer’s frustration. She waves her photocopies of Montauk in the air and says she wants to talk about the Spanish translation as she runs back into the living room. “I’m so angry.” She really does appear to be angry, flipping so energetically through the pages that it looks as if she’s going to tear them right out of their spiral biding, searching for what is, she says, an unpardonable treason. The writer insists that they have a game, and the young woman agrees, but just to a few rounds, because she doesn’t want to get sweaty. In exchange, he promises to give her his bank account number so that she can make her rent deposit, as per their agreement.

  Naturally, the noise of the bouncing ball doesn’t help Julia’s concentration at all. In Montauk, the writer says that the click-click of the Ping-Pong ball in the empty room sounded funny. To Julia, though, the echoing noise sets her on edge. Aggressive thoughts. If she picked up a paddle, she could wipe the floor with both of them. But on a pilota court, against a wall, with a real paddle. She played the game a lot with the boys when she was young, bare-handed, too, with leather balls. The sound of a pilota ball hitting a wall is something else. That heavy, violent thump, of stone against stone.

  Now the overriding sound is the ball hopping up and down—click-click-click-click—on the floor.

  Enough for today. They finally quit playing. The young woman says she’s sweating, though she looks impeccable. The writer is visibly out of breath, and he starts panting even more heavily when she insists he give her his bank account information. He stalls, tries to change the subject, and asks her what it was she was so angry about. But she won’t be sidetracked, and she insists—she has to pay him. Martin finally gives in. It’s one thing that’s always impressed Julia, the fact that he knows his bank account number by heart, because it’s the only thing he knows. He writes it down on an empty medicine box, despite being surrounded by index cards, papers, and Post-its, and Julia knows why. He’s obviously hoping to tell the girl the same joke he told her last night. He said he’d decided to stop taking antidepressants and that he’d dumped the whole box out on top of the pansies, and it had perked them right up. Since the flowers did actually look a little less wilted, she found it funny—just as the American girl does, of course—but now she feels bad that he has no qualms whatsoever about repeating the same gag, as if she weren’t sitting right there.

  Traduttore traditore. The main reason she’s angry is that according to the Spanish translation, when Max and Lynn leave the hotel at Montauk, the writer is furious that the girl isn’t going to find out how much he’s had to pay for their stay there. She points at the line Julia should read, like a teacher to a pupil, and Julia obeys her: “Le irrita, luego, el pensamiento de que Lynn, que se ha encargado de hacer las reservas, apenas tenga idea de lo que él ha tenido que pagar por las dos noches que han pasado aquí.”

  But the real text, she complains, is quite different. It doesn’t say that “he is then irritated by the thought that Lynn, who made the booking, will hardly have any idea how much he’s had to pay for the two nights they’ve spent there.” What Max is actually angry about, in fact, is Lynn knowing what an expensive bill he had to settle. Almost twice what the girl earns in a week. It’s very clear in the English translation, which was revised and approved by Frisch himself, but they can’t compare the Spanish version with it, because she’s lent it to Harri, which she lets out a cry of frustration about, but she’s sure that’s what it says. She stands there looking at each of them. It seems to be a matter of vital importance that they believe her, and Julia tries to calm her down. She remembers well that she’d been extremely surprised by that passage when she read it in Spanish; that revelation of stinginess in the writer—wanting the girl to know how much it had cost him to sleep with her—would have been more fitting for an arrogant dirty old man, nothing like Max’s respectful, natural attitude toward Lynn throughout the book, nor was
it in keeping with his attitude about money, which he talks about extensively. It would have been more natural for the writer—with his guilty conscience about being rich—to feel ashamed or sorry that the girl might see him spending what was a lot of money for her in such a carefree manner. It also contradicts the paragraph as a whole—because Lynn made the booking herself, she must, inevitably have known what the rates were. Isn’t that right? The girl is extremely grateful for what she says; Julia, on the other hand, is rather disconcerted by seeing how influential a translator can be, even though the mistake seems terrible to her, as well, and especially terrible considering she thinks of the Max in Montauk, with all his weaknesses, as being a noble, loveable man, and likewise, the mean, despicable attitude in the Spanish translation could by no means, it seems, be shared by Max Frisch the author, not from what you can gather from his diary and from what several people who knew him—she thinks of Reich-Ranicki—wrote about him.

  More things about Max and money. The young American likes Max’s approach to money. He’s generous, but he also knows what money’s worth. Even though he’s become rich and can easily satisfy all his whims, he hasn’t forgotten that he was once poor; he’s suffered his whole life as a result of some badly executed dental work he had done in a low-cost clinic that employed apprentices. She also likes the way he acceded, as a young man, to his friend W.—whom he thought of as being above him in all ways: tall, rich, and well educated—giving him his high-quality jackets as hand-me-downs and lending him money to pay for his studies. Money that, in fact, he never in turn gave back, in order that his friend’s generosity would remain unrequited, that is to say because he knew that W. liked to feel superior to people and have them in his debt.

  Julia is in complete agreement with Frisch—everyone should live according to how much they earn. She understands him so well when he says that a particular restaurant is not for him! Like him, Julia is not drawn by material things that are not for her, and she’s not attracted by store windows with expensive, exclusive objects in them, although she does allow herself something of the highest quality from time to time. They’re things for rich people, and she isn’t rich. But that’s not a problem for her. She thinks that arriving at such an état d’esprit—such a state of mind—is the result of long years of training.

  Martin gets up and ambles out of the living room. He gets bored listening to them talking about another writer with such enthusiasm, he feels jealous, and Julia prefers his leaving to seeing him sitting there doing his best to make sure they know he’s not interested in what they’re talking about. Now that he’s left, she can tell Lynn about something that happened when she was little and that Zigor found very funny. As always, she’s not sure whether it’s exactly her own memory, something she saw herself, or if it’s something she was told about later on. In any case, it happened one late afternoon on some holiday. Her parents, her sister, and she had gone to Donostia for a stroll, wearing their best clothes. She doesn’t know how old she was, but she was holding her father’s hand—she always held his hand—as they walked along Hernani Kalea, which is where Martin lived when he was young, and they were going to take the bus or the tram, she’s not sure which, to go back to Martutene, and she saw that some men were opening the doors of the cars parked there, getting in without a care in the world, starting the engines, and driving off; she told her father to do the same thing, to take one of the empty cars in the row. They had to explain the crude reality to her, told her that those cars had other owners, and although she doesn’t remember how the rest of that holiday afternoon they spent strolling around the Alderdi-Eder park went, she thinks she was probably sad, and when she went to bed that night, she must have wondered why some parents had cars and others didn’t, and why she had to be the daughter of parents without a car. She suspects that sometimes, seeing her father sitting in the kitchen with his legs stretched out like the president of the United States, his feet resting on top of the coal box, happy and singing because he had had a good dinner—“I have a wife, I have a son / I have a daughter, too / Good health / Enough wealth / What more do I need?”—she would wonder what a man who had so little could possibly be happy about, and that picture of happiness made her sad, angry even. She used to think that her contented father was incapable of realizing that there were wonderful things in the world apart from those few that satisfied him.

  When she sees a child in the street holding the hand of one of those men who look defeated by life, sometimes she feels indescribable tenderness and sorrow, because she thinks that the resigned child looking up at his or her father with love, and even admiration, is actually fully aware of what fate has dealt them. Even so, it’s clear that children accept their parents with excessive conformity, more so than the parents do the children, although it should, in all justice, be the other way around. Now, however, she’s of the impression that she had an excellent father. A fine father, a loving one, one who smelled good and admired knowledge. What she wouldn’t give to be able to hold him in her arms just once. To hold him as the woman she is and feel his strong warmth.

  In fact, she doesn’t mind the American girl seeing the tears in her eyes.

  They hear Martin’s steps in the hallway, and both women keep quiet until the direction of the steps reveals that he’s gone into the library. They smile at each other. It’s obvious he can’t hear them, but the girl lowers her voice when she mentions Martin. She’s worried, because several people have told her, when she mentioned what she’s paying in rent, that the conditions are a far cry from the usual market rate, a real bargain. The obvious answer would be that there’s no need for her to feel uncomfortable, because the owner feels very well-compensated by her company. But she doesn’t want the girl to feel her anger, and she doesn’t want her to feel she’s in debt to him, either. She admits that it really is a low rent but explains that Martin doesn’t want just any type of tenant at the house—someone with children, or who wants to stay for a long time—because he doesn’t have clear plans for the future of the building, or for himself, either.

  She doesn’t know why she feels like saying that Martin doesn’t have to worry about money, but that’s what she says. She explains that while she doesn’t know all the details of his financial situation and assets, she does know that he has more than enough to live on. His basic income comes from the rent he receives on some apartments he owns downtown. She knows that he owns a lot of stock in addition to that, but unless something out of the ordinary happens, he just reinvests the dividends from them. She’s heard him say that what he wants to do is give back everything he received from his family—a family he can’t stand. Deep down he’s a puritan, he has simple habits, he’s proud of not having a car, and when he buys something—clothes, music, gadgets, and suchlike—even though he usually chooses the most expensive things on the market, he then makes them last forever. He boasts about not caring about money, and sometimes it does seem that he really isn’t aware of its value. But that style of his, which could be seen as a virtue, has harmful consequences for Julia, and two in particular: sometimes, having her feet more firmly on the ground, it’s she who has to pay their shared bills, even though she’s far from well-off; and secondly, she has to remind him more than she would like that he owes her money, and that, in turn, usually makes her feel that she’s the stingy one.

  Money is freedom and safety. Lynn says that Martin is very lucky to have the means to allow him the time to write what he wants with no limits, without the restraints of having to earn a living. There’s something there that Julia isn’t so sure about. It probably isn’t in Martin’s character to write at the rate that Balzac, for instance, was forced to in order to pay off his debts, but sometimes she thinks that it wouldn’t be bad for him to have a deadline for finishing his pieces, in the way that professional writers probably have, because in his situation he can put work to one side whenever he comes across any type of obstacle. But it’s even worse than that—he isn’t capable of
putting his work on hold and traveling, for instance. When he can’t solve a problem, he’s unable to put it to one side, either, it becomes an obsession, and he becomes trapped by it. Another result of his being able to write without any deadlines, except for in a few cases, is that his writing tends to have the dull taste of food that’s been overcooked. “Looking for the adjective.” Harri and Julia use that expression for the times when he gets nervous and ill-tempered because he’s stuck in his work, times that find him going in and out of the library all day, in and out of the yard all day, literally like a mental patient, his head down, his hands held behind him as he walks along. When they see him like that, they say he’s “looking for the adjective.” Even now Julia sometimes gets bored of seeing him like that and can’t resist saying to him that he should turn the computer off and go to the movie theater, or go for a swim. Very bad idea. She can just see him saying “What would you know about it?”—his body bent over, his arms crossed over his stomach as if he were in great pain. But in fact she does know something about it. She sometimes thinks she could write a thesis about it. But she knows that he doesn’t say “What would you know about it?” out of the arrogance of a misunderstood artist, telling someone at a lower level that they cannot possibly understand the suffering of someone at a higher level. The fact is that he suffers with his obsessions, he’s restless, because he’s been condemned, for some reason he finds incomprehensible, to dedicating his efforts to something that he’s incapable of doing. And when he finally allows himself to turn the computer off, he spends the following hours, until he goes to bed, in a state of complete dejection, unable to forget that the next day, he will have to face up to his inability once more. When he’s feeling productive, however, he doesn’t seem to write much more. He doesn’t trust how easy it is, because it comes too quickly (“Pégase marche plus souvent qu’il ne galope,” as his beloved Flaubert says), and when he finds it easy to write, the fear that he’ll have to check the next day if it’s any good doesn’t help him at all. In particular, when he used to write at night with the help of some Armagnac—his style flowing from his pen like the blood through young Flaubert’s veins—and in the morning had to judge his pages of inspiration and admit that they were nothing special, he would become unbearably frustrated. Julia is now able to understand the extraordinary extent to which finding that out exasperates the writer. (As Flaubert said—more or less—lapsing from the intoxication of genius to a desolate feeling of mediocrity, with all the fury of a king deposed.)