They sing their sad songs.
They lie on the grass for a long time after the girl turns out the light, looking at the moon and the patchy clouds that keep trying to cover it up.
Ene aberri laztana,
Jausi zara erbestepian,
zelan ondiño il etzara!
Zeure basotik atzo igoten zan
eskari ona zerura,
gaur erdeldunak sartuta
aixia emen biraoz bete da.
Obea eriotza da!
It means, “My dear homeland, you’ve fallen to the foreigner, you’d be better off dead! Yesterday from your woods, good requests were sent to heaven, today vile people have come, the wind here is full of curses. Death is better than this!”
Kepa, though, doesn’t know the words to “Ene aberri laztana”—maybe that’s why he likes myths. Abaitua, on the other hand, learned it from his mother, he thinks that’s the only way you can learn it. The music is beautiful, very beautiful he’d say, as beautiful as the words are vile. He doesn’t know why, but sometimes, when he’s feeling particularly sad, the verses come to him from somewhere deep inside—ene aberri laztana—it comes out of his soul and lessens his sorrow. It isn’t a song to sing solo, but he’d be scared to sing it with a group.
Later, back in his room, he’s glad to be sleeping alone.
The young American sociologist comes into the dining room at precisely the time they agreed upon. She’s wearing the green shorts she had on the night before and a sleeveless beige T-shirt. It’s obvious she’s happy. They ask each other how they’ve slept. “I slept like a baby,” the girl says, and then in Basque, “Umea bezala, is that right?” Kepa only ever sleeps about four hours; Abaitua’s seen it before, a few times when he’s had to share a room with him. He spends the night smoking and reading. Last night he read Tolstoy’s diaries. He didn’t just read them, Abaitua clarifies, he’s learned them by heart, as well. The girl’s hair is wet, and she keeps leaning her head from one side to the other, resting her ponytail on her shoulders. The two men, almost simultaneously, say that she’ll catch cold. She laughs. She’s used to it, she hardly ever dries her hair. “What’s the plan?” She says she’s ready to scale a 20,000-footer. Kepa’s brought a great selection of hiking books and maps. And a sophisticated GPS and all the technological devices an expert mountaineer could ever want. He spreads a large map out on the table for them to decide where to go, but, he says, the weather’s supposed to change, unfortunately—scattered showers. Abaitua’s very surprised by that, because the sky’s clear, there’s no wind whatsoever, and everything looks stable. He suspects Kepa is hoping to avoid going out hiking, as he always does. What he likes is going on road trips, visiting towns, and looking for good restaurants. He’s like Pilar in that sense. He remembers that the two couples once went together to visit the Great Dune. Neither Pilar nor Kepa wanted to walk, and he had to go the whole way, slowly, with Kepa’s wife—it was like a procession she went so slowly. She was wearing an oriental type of headscarf—being so white that she was practically albino, she was scared of getting sunburned—and she talked nonstop about things only she was interested in, on the way there and on the way back. When they returned, Pilar and Kepa were sitting at a bar on the edge of the beach with a large tray of empty oyster shells and a bottle of Chablis in front of them; the bottle, too, was empty. “Voilà nos explorateurs,” said Pilar, looking very lively.
But Abaitua needs to walk and tire out his body. He likes hiking, reaching some town they’ve spotted from up in the hills, he thinks he discovers them in their intimacy when he reaches the first houses with their kitchen garden, and next the fields, and then little by little the streets begin to appear. Kepa says he only mentions it because he’s heard it on the French weather forecast. He’s trying to get over a sudden coughing fit, and Abaitua and the girl, a little taken aback, remain silent. When he recovers, and still with tears in his eyes, he says he’s not going to stop smoking, he won’t give up until he’s quite sure what blame, sin, or perdition it brings with it . . . Something of Tolstoy’s he read the night before.
Café noissette. “If you want a real ebaki, a real cortado, you have to ask for café avec une noisette,” Kepa tells the young American. Spaniards really like asking for café crème, because it’s mentioned in a lot of songs, and that’s why they always end up drinking milky coffee. “And what about café au lait?” the girl asks.
Then, while Abaitua is trying to get Kepa to firm up their plans, the American girl says she thinks all their different suggestions are good. Just one thing, she dares to add, she’d like to go to a bookstore to buy the French translation of Montauk for Julia. She’s going to have trouble finding it in any of the bookstores in the area. Even in Biarritz or Baiona. Perhaps in Bordeaux, Kepa says very enthusiastically, why don’t they go to Bordeaux. The girl turns toward Abaitua with a sparkle in her eyes, like a child who doesn’t dare to ask for permission. Her request is as clear as it is mute, but Abaitua finds it hard to hide the fact that he’s put out. He says he doesn’t mind. But there’s a problem. The girl stands up, holds the sides of her pants, and stretches them out with a comic gesture to say that she can’t go to Bordeaux dressed like this. Of course she can, she looks great, Kepa says. They’re about to finish breakfast. The American girl eats with gusto, almost with zest. She puts the food into her mouth quickly, and swallows it quickly, as well. At the moment she realizes that the two men are looking at her, she holds up the horn of a croissant between her index finger and thumb and says, “Un vrai croissant,” with an expression of great pleasure on her face. They’re very good, the pastry is flakier than the ones on the other side of the border, she says—“más hojaldrados que los del otro lado.” Kepa says it’s because of the dough. Ordinary croissants have just enough butter, and special ones have four times as much. Butter only, no other type of fat.
When they find themselves alone for a moment, the girl tells Abaitua she’s worried she jumped too quickly at the idea of going to Bordeaux and that it’s spoiled his plans for going hiking in the mountains. He reassures her—any plan’s good if she’s part of it. He acts out the sentiment by making a gesture of reverence, and nothing could be closer to the truth. Everything seems fun to him, stimulating even, when she’s there, he has to admit that, and he doesn’t mind the girl seeing that. So he says, and suddenly speaking seriously for once, that she has nothing to worry about, he’s going to be honest with her, and if he doesn’t like something, he’ll just tell her.
There’s another matter, as well, the girl says, that she’d like to clear up once and for all so that they don’t have to keep coming back to it. She has her old wallet in her hand and nods energetically toward the hotel reception desk. She wants to pay her share. Abaitua didn’t expect that of her, and he likes it. He’s always thought that what girls used to do in his day when it came time for a bill to be paid—pretending they didn’t notice—was rude. And now this sign that the girl sees him as an equal companion—someone she splits bills with and not an aged old man who’s expected to pay for her company with gifts and favor—cheers him. Impossible, he tells her. He has no difficulty improvising the explanation that Kepa and he have a joint fund for their trips and have decided to treat her. The two of them are treating her, he says, just in case it wasn’t clear.
Abaitua can’t stop thinking about different scenes from Montauk that seem to fit the situation. Even before the girl mentioned wanting to get ahold of the French translation, when she put her glasses on to see the woodpigeon blind they were pointing out to her up on the hill, he remembered that the writer saw the Lynn in Montauk as “una mezcla de ondina y nurse”—a combination of undine and nurse. He had to look up the word ondina in the dictionary: a nymph who lives at the bottom of the sea. Now, as they walk toward the car, Lynn has taken her glasses off again. She says his hiking shirt is very nice—it’s brown with yellow checks, and Abaitua wears it over his shoulders as a light j
acket—and he’s reminded of something that happened to him long ago when he was wearing the same shirt, just as the writer does in Montauk with his own denim shirt.
At least ten years have gone by since then. Kepa and he were quite annoyed with each other. He’d refused to go for a drive as Kepa had suggested and instead left him sitting there doing sketches of houses in Bidarrai and, just as a matter of principle, went up to hike in the mountains by himself. After a good walk along a marked route, he reached mountain pass in Eguzki Mendi that he later found out was called Mehatxeko, and here, as on so many mountains in the Basque Country, he came across the disappointing spectacle of a large group of parked cars and noisy people. They were talking around a fire on which several large pots were being heated. Some of them came up to him as if he were a long lost brother—“notre frère”—and offered him a cup of soup. They also gave him a card with the Virgin Mary on it, the one from Fatima, he thinks, and told him they were from Bordeaux. They looked worryingly like members of some sect, and while Abaitua was thinking about how to get away from them, a young hiker appeared and after greeting them in French said seriously but politely that they were heating their pots on top of a megalithic monument. Those stones around their fire were part of a cromlech, a prehistoric tomb.
Because they took it as a joke, the young man told them again, not aggressively but angrily now, that it was a sacred place, probably a burial ground of their ancestors from thousands of years ago. And then the man who seemed to be the leader, full of the wrath of God, started kicking the stones and shouting that churches were the only sacred places and how dare he go around spewing such irreverent nonsense. Abaitua, looking at the perfect circle of stones around the fire, was ashamed. The young hiker was wearing a brown shirt like his. He was a typical young man from the area, not too big, but strong and agile. He looked at the members of the group in front of him, from one end to the other, and for some reason, his eyes stopped on Abaitua, who stammered, “I didn’t know.” He saw a brief sign of surprise in the man’s eyes as he realized he was a countryman of his, and then his look changed and it was clear that he despised him, really despised him. Finally, his eyes moved away, he looked at the head of the sect and said that it wasn’t surprising there were terrorist attacks against tourists. He turned around and walked away quickly. His words caused a great commotion in the group. They insulted him for saying that a pile of worthless stones were sacred. A few of them went after the young man, to take photos of him, and the leader said that he would talk with the prefect as soon as they got back to Bordeaux, he was a friend of his, and that young man was undoubtedly a terrorist. Abaitua took advantage of the uproar and went back down the hill along the same path he had come up it.
Kepa says it was eight years ago.
They’re talking about megalithic monuments now. Cromlechs and the metaphysics of the void. But on the way to Bordeaux, and without any wine, their ancestors’ voices are hardly audible.
He doesn’t know which exit to take out of the traffic circle and, as he often does, goes around it twice. He took a wrong turning at a crossroads earlier, but neither Kepa nor the girl minded. We’re lost again, the girl says, in the plural, and thanks to that wording, getting lost isn’t as frustrating for him as it would be if he were with Pilar; he would have gotten angry with her long ago because she would have told him off for not paying attention. That makes him remember that in Montauk, the writer reflects on how different it is when the girl tells him off about something, because she uses his name—“You’re wrong, Max.”
Even so, they still pull his leg a bit. Kepa says it’s very exciting to go driving places with him—you never know where you’re going to end up—and the girl, with a completely serious voice, says she doesn’t think he really gets lost, he does it on purpose just in case anyone’s following them, he wants to throw them off the track.
They’ve been on a flat, straight road going through an endless pine forest for more than an hour now. Kepa and Abaitua are singing French songs. Abaitua has a baritone voice, and Kepa sings bass. The communist Jean Ferrat’s “Ma France.” “Cet air de liberté au-delà des frontières.” The voice of the Republic now fills their breasts. “Celle du vieil Hugo tonnant de son exil”—old Hugo’s voice as he returns from exile. Lynn doesn’t understand the words, and they translate them for her. They admit they’re Francophiles. La France, back when Spain was a sad place, au-delà des frontières—just there beyond the border. Aragon’s lyrics in “L’Affiche rouge”—that tribute to Manouchian and his comrades in the MOI, the Main-d’œuvre immigrée, the French Resistance’s immigrant force, to the Armenians, Romanians, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Spaniards, and Germans, too, who were executed at Mont Valérienen, pour la France. “Parce qu’à prononcer vos noms sont difficiles . . . Ils étaient vingt et trois quand les fusils fleurirent . . . Vingt et trois qui criaient la France en s’abattant”—Because your names are difficult to pronounce . . . There were twenty-three of them when the guns fired . . . Twenty-three who shouted “France!” as they fell. Ferrat himself was of foreign origin, and Léo Ferré and Aznavour and Moustaki and Montand and Reggiani and Sylvie Vartan and Marie Lafôret and Carla Bruni and le president, Sarkozy. La France: churning out French people until very recently. Kepa talks about integration, assimilation, and multiculturalism. He says he’s in favor of assimilation as long as cultural activities that don’t harm republican principles aren’t forbidden. The young American sociologist, on the other hand, defends multiculturalism, but they don’t quarrel. Abaitua keeps quiet on the subject, as he often does, because he has a tendency to go against whatever he’s confronted with, and right now he doesn’t know who to side with. What he thinks is that you see things very differently depending on your culture’s position, whether it’s in a more dominant position or about to disappear. It occurs to him that Kepa’s own personal assimilation has been perfect. The only thing he’s inherited from his Andalusian culture, from his parents, is eating his olives with bread. And that’s no bad thing. Pilar also likes eating olives with bread whenever she can; he remembers she picked it up from Kepa.
A hill of sand disappearing off on the horizon. If you only looked to the north and south, you might think you were in the desert. A dune almost two miles long and well over three hundred feet tall. The longest dune in Europe, Kepa says. To the west, to their left, it goes gently down to the sea, and to the east, meanwhile, it falls sharply down to the pine forest. Their feet sink deep into the sand, and Kepa starts panting after barely a quarter of an hour of walking. He lets himself fall backward onto the sand and takes out his packet of cigarettes. The other two had better go on, he’ll wait for them and smoke a cigarette. Abaitua thinks that he, Kepa, must also remember that the same thing happened when they were out with their wives. Lynn and Abaitua go on. The girl goes first, and it looks as if walking doesn’t require her to make any effort. The writer and the Lynn in Montauk also walked on the beach, the girl going first, the man following after her. The girl had a comb, one end of it sticking out of the back pocket on her jeans. He was surprised by that when he read it. At one time, tough guys used to keep combs in their back pockets. They would hold their heads to one side and run their hands over their occipital lobes. It really does look as if they’re in a desert now. Really. Although she’s very thin, she does have curves. The writer in Montauk says she’s very thin but not bony. This girl’s ponytail bobs from side to side, as well. She turns around, makes that gesture in which her lips lengthen and her eyes wrinkle; there’s affection in her smile. “Thank you for asking me along,” she says.
They listen to the radio. Temps calme partout. Le soleil s’impose sur l’ensemble du pays Calm and stable. Sunny weather all over the country. Kepa says that isn’t what he heard that morning. But Iñaki Abaitua doesn’t care anymore. However, when Kepa mentions the idea of going to Archon to eat some oysters, he puts his foot down—it would mean reaching Bordeaux too late. Perhaps on the way back.
Martutene Page 34
