Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Julia’s main pedagogical concern when it comes to her son is showing him that it’s possible to disagree without getting angry; although it’s something that she herself seldom achieves. While her mother washes the dishes—distant now that she’s said all that she had to say—she tries to convince the boy that the theory about the place name is unreasonable. If the Romans didn’t go all the way up to Errezil, it would be because they didn’t want to eat any apples. They were quite capable of going wherever they pleased, for instance to Oiartzun, because there was silver there, and because the Basques, unlike many others, did not oppose them. Quite the contrary—they seem to have been fascinated by Roman civilization and they fought for the empire. She tells him about the Cohors I Vardulorum regiment, which helped conquer Britain, and which left an inscription to the “mother goddesses” at what is now Rochester, on Hadrian’s Wall; it’s the only known case of a dedication to female deities and also the only one put up not by an officer but by the whole corps. She talks to him about the Cohors II Vasconum Civium Romanorum unit. It was the Basques themselves who defended the passes in the Pyrenees, and it was after the fall of the empire, when the Barbarians sought to invade, that the Basques became warlike.

  The boy listens to her with attention, happy with this new vision of pragmatic Basques who know how to make friends with power rather than uselessly throwing stones against it. He says very seriously, “You know what? We did the right thing. It was much more sensible to get together with the Romans than to go against them.” In fact, although Julia thinks that valuing pragmatism and playing down the importance of rebelliousness is a step in the right direction, she’s aware that she’s been a little bit too enthusiastic in her telling of history, and that she’s still left out the most important lesson of all: the members of those Basque tribes were their own people, their ancestors, and so whatever they did—throw stones at the Romans or sell them Errezil apples and Idiazabal cheese—was fine, and a reason to feel proud.

  Her mother continues washing the dishes in silence, and when Julia goes over to help her, she doesn’t let her. “I’m almost finished.” She clearly thinks her daughter is a traitor. She doesn’t know just how loyal she really is. Mother and daughter are watching television—the daughter forces herself to watch it so that her mother won’t be alone—and the boy is reading in his room.

  What’s an anagram? he shouts from his bedroom. He’s gotten into the habit of looking up words he doesn’t know in the dictionary, and he doesn’t ask her for definitions so much anymore. Julia wonders if he no longer trusts her knowledge so much, because all too often she hasn’t known what to say. Anagram—this time she does know the word. When it comes to examples, however, the only one that comes to mind is the one she was taught at school—amor/Roma—but Zigor needs them in Basque. She can’t think of a single one. But she does think of another one in Spanish—azar/raza. On the last day of her writing workshop, the teacher mentioned how difficult it is to translate sentences containing anagrams and, as an exercise, gave them a poem by José Miguel Ullán. “Diles / que no hay más raza que el azar / que no hay más patria que el dolor”—tell them that there is no other race than chance, that there is no other homeland than pain. A sentiment that expresses so well what she was trying to get across to Zigor a short while before. Finally, she thinks of ate/eta—the Basque words for “door” and “and”—and Zigor comes up with ogi/igo—“bread” and “to rise”; gora/garo—“up” and “fern”; and ore/ero—“dough” and “crazy.” After hitting upon the first one, the rest come easily. Erraz/zerra—“easy” and “saw.”

  On the television, some well-known people are all answering the same question: “When have you ever wanted to disappear from the face of the earth?” A famous chef doesn’t mind saying that once, when he was waiting for his girlfriend, he was feeling uncomfortably flatulent, and after attempting to relieve his discomfort, he suddenly felt a trickle of liquid running down his legs and he had to tuck his pants into his socks, as he did when riding his bike. “That’s when I wished I could disappear from the face of the earth!” and he laughs happily as he tells the story.

  Julia’s mother says nothing. She really likes the uninhibited chef.

  Julia remembers the last lines of Jules Renard’s Journal, which had such a great effect on Beckett; according to one of his biographers, after reading it for the first time, he then spent hours sitting in front of the fire repeating it: “Last night I wanted to get up. Dead weight. A leg hangs outside. Then a trickle runs down my leg. I allow it to reach my heel before I make up my mind. It will dry in the sheets, the way it did when I was Poil de Carotte.” Apparently Beckett thought the natural way in which Renard dealt with physiological matters was admirable. Julia would like to know what he would have made of today’s dominatingly natural approach to things.

  She hears her mother’s radio from the hallway. She goes to sleep with it on, and her loud snoring accompanies the programming, which is mostly talk shows. She opens Zigor’s door. The light’s off, but he tells her to come in, he’s awake. She sits on the side of the bed like her own father used to do. A man who was proud to belong to a noble, hard-working race, who taught her about egalitarianism and the importance of keeping your word. The poor man, humble and loyal as he was, saw himself as no less than a Montmorency.

  “What we talked about earlier.” She wants to tell him that he doesn’t have to feel obliged to be loyal to any real or notional ancestors. Who knows if he might not be descended from some Roman legionary who turned up one day in Oiartzun? All they really have to do is try to be honest and live without hurting anyone, respecting the culture and the countryside while being faithful to knowledge, which is one of mankind’s most important achievements. She’ll try to express it better in writing. Do you know what I mean? The boy says he does, no need to go on about it.

  Julia feels like talking. She’s interested in the interviews he’s doing about the Spanish civil war. He isn’t very happy about them, all the old people say exactly the same things—the war was terrible, they went really hungry, the Germans and the Italians helped Franco. An old woman told him the same story he’s heard his grandmother tell a hundred times, the one about the woman running away from the bombardment and looking for shelter and suddenly realizing that the child in her arms is dead. He sits up in bed, lively all of a sudden. He speaks lower and asks if she believes the story of his grandmother’s about how the Falangist leaders asked his grandfather during the war what he would do if the lehendakari turned up and he answered that he would do his duty and hide the Basque government’s president. At first she doesn’t know how to answer, she’s had the same doubt for years. If it’s true, it seems too daring for a person who was in charge of cooking for the Falangists and never once tried to poison them. She thinks that must be what Zigor’s thinking, and it’s what she used to think herself when she listened to her father. She knows her father used to tell the story, but she doesn’t remember him telling it.

  “Why wouldn’t you believe it?”

  “It seems a bit dumb to me.”

  “He wanted to show them just how loyal and noble Basque patriots were.”

  Zigor lies down again, but his eyes are wide open, she sees them shining in the dark. Julia doesn’t know whether to tell him her theory about her father’s hypothetical act of bravery. She thinks that what he said happened could have happened. It could be true that Colonel Urroz once asked him the question and that her father replied that he would hide Lehendakari Agirre because he was sure that was what the colonel wanted to hear. Because he knew, somehow, that Urroz—a member of the gentry of Navarre, who loved late nights and was a good man at heart—liked people who lived up to the model of noble, incorruptible townsfolk, and her father had taken the risk and told him what he wanted to hear. It’s significant that, according to her father, he made him repeat his daring expression of loyalty more than once. She’s sure about that, and because of that, she can i
magine the colonel, with some of his comrades-inarms, sitting around after lunch, and after drinking a lot of brandy, calling for her father to come out so that he could show him off like a circus monkey, asking him the question again so that the others could see just how humble, loyal, and dumb these Basque farmers were. She wonders if she has the right to share that theory with him. She isn’t sure, and what’s more, her mother has woken up and is telling her off from the adjoining room. Let him get some sleep, she shouts at Julia, he has to get up early tomorrow, you know. A voice without teeth making a mess of the s’s. She always sleeps with the door ajar. And you go to bed, too, daughter. She’s seldom seen her without her teeth in.

  A piece of library furniture with an oak plywood finish that has a folding table that comes out of it and isn’t very stable anymore, because the screws in the arms are loose. She tries to tighten them but can’t. It’s the plywood that’s loose. She takes the French translation of Montauk that Lynn gave her and her still unused blue notebook out of her bag and sits down at the table. She feels tired.

  Traduit de l’allemand par Michèle et Jean Tailleur. The Montaigne quote is written in old French: C’est icy un livre de bonne foy, lecteur. The text is easy to read, there’s nothing to make you think it was originally written in another language. Montauk. 11.5.1974. L’écrivain redoute les sentiments qui ne se prêtent pas à la publication—the writer is wary of feelings that may not be appropriate for publication. She reads aloud a few scattered passages that she’s already familiar with, to see how they sound in French, and comes across the part Martin mentioned to her, the one he said she would identify with. It’s almost at the start of page 87: “Je n’ai pas vécu avec toi pur te servir de matériau littéraire. Je t’interdis d’écrire sur moi”—I have not been living with you to provide literary material. I forbid you to write about me.

  Julia has never dared say anything like that, it would be arrogant of her, and unfortunately, she thinks he has the right to use anything he wants to. She’s also never said “your shit literature” as Flora Ugalde did.

  The six-foot-wide bed is too narrow. Even though she normally sleeps curled up, when she can sleep, she always likes rolling over, stretching out, and feeling how fresh the sheets are. She would rather have a wider bed. It would be tight, but a double bed would fit if they took the bedside table out. But she’s never thought of having one brought in. She supposes it’s because she doesn’t want to bother her mother. It would be an unnecessary expense, an extravagance, something that a serious woman wouldn’t do. And yet her mother would like her to dress more provocatively—deeper necklines, shorter skirts—and wear makeup. Use her womanly charms. Using one’s womanly charm isn’t something for sluts, or at least it isn’t only for sluts. In fact, what her mother reproaches her for, though not openly, is being a slut but without getting any benefits from that inclination of hers. A vocational slut, so to speak. Depraved.

  She remembers Martin teasing her, “So you’ve always been like this!”

  She’d never told anyone, and yet she told him. Why? To reciprocate, clearly. She felt obliged to open her heart and share a confidence of the same caliber with him. Telling her about the scene in the library, just admitting that as a boy he had masturbated to dirty books, must have required a great effort from him, embarrassed as he was by things like that, and so when he asked her to tell him something intimate and risqué in exchange, she thought it would be healthy for their relationship to share good things, bad things, and even terrible things, and she would actually say she felt glad to have a story of sexual abuse to tell him, something on the same level as the information he’d just trusted her with.

  It was the first time she ever described that event in her life as “sexual abuse.” Although it was a secret, she never thought about it very much. It was something that had happened a long time ago, something that was far from pleasant but didn’t, she believes, do her too much harm, either. After telling Martin about it, she wondered if having kept it silent until then might not have been due to the tendency children have to feel guilty when they go through experiences like that. She isn’t sure. In fact, she’s never taken an interest in reading about the issue, and it seems to her now that perhaps that very lack of interest was a subconscious effort to avoid the subject, and a sign that the events were more traumatic than she ever wanted to admit.

  She doesn’t know exactly how it happened, but she does remember a few details. She knows the man seemed old to her—although he probably wasn’t, because he was a friend of her father’s; she figures he must have been younger than forty at the time. And he was ugly. She can’t bring him to mind, but she knows he was fat and had some sort of problem with his eyes, maybe a lazy eye, or one he couldn’t fully open. His lips were licentious, meaty, the lower one bigger than the upper, and he had something on them, perhaps a black lump, probably a small angioma. She doesn’t know how she knows that, since she can’t recall his face, so to an extent it’s as if someone told her about it. However, although she probably reconstructed some of the repulsive physical image later in life, she’s sure she would recognize him if she saw him in a photograph. She isn’t sure how old she was, but at least ten, because she and a neighbor who was a year older than her were allowed to walk alone down to the provincial government building to see the man, who she thinks must have worked there as a civil servant. They used to go to the building in the evening, by which time there was nobody there. She doesn’t know how they would get in to see the man, but she thinks he used to be sitting behind a wooden table in an anteroom or some sort of hallway, and he wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, and because of that she knows he was a concierge, although she isn’t sure if he had gold braiding on his sleeves.

  The man used to lower their panties and touch their vulvas, hers more than her friend’s. In fact, the man didn’t like her friend going, because when he touched her, she started laughing and squirming; she, on the other hand, stayed still and serious, so that the man would finish quickly and she could take the pencils he used to give them and run out as soon as possible. They were good pencils. That detail about their reward is something she could have kept quiet about, but she found it difficult to lie, back then even more so than now, and she thinks she wanted to be very honest at the time, because it was back when she and Martin were starting their new phase of trusting each other more. So she told him that she usually had to convince the other girl to go with her, because she didn’t want to go alone, and so, apparently, she also didn’t want to renounce the possibility of getting the pencils. Her decision to be sincere probably led to her putting too much emphasis on her interest in getting the pencils and, at the same time, made her look worse than her friend. And in fact it’s true that she was more interested in pencils than her friend. Being a hard-working pupil, she kept beautiful notebooks, and her friend, on the other hand, didn’t much care about them. She was more interested in talking about boys. She was a year older than her—and still is, because she’s still alive—and she was much more awake to certain things and, without doubt, more aware of what was going on with that man. Julia was more innocent, and because of that, she would feel pleased when that revolting man told her, while fondling her small breasts, that hers were going to grow bigger than her friends’. She thinks that’s accurate, that she used to feel proud, and that’s how she told Martin about it.

  Those caresses came to an end when her friend told her parents what was going on. Of course, they told Julia’s parents, who asked her if it was true. She doesn’t remember how that went, either. She thinks she was annoyed that her friend had betrayed her, and a little frustrated, too, perhaps because she wouldn’t be getting those pencils any more. She doesn’t think her parents hearing about it had any serious consequences, and she’s sure they didn’t get angry with her. They didn’t reproach her for anything, and even kept quiet about it. She’s always wondered why she and her friend reacted to the abuse in such different ways. S
he certainly wouldn’t say it was because she was in any way more malicious. She wasn’t, quite the opposite, she was probably purer and more loyal, as well; they’d promised the man that they wouldn’t tell on him, and so she kept her word. She thinks the basic reason was that her parents knew the man, and at the same time, he’d made it very clear that he wanted the relationship to be with her, he didn’t like the other girl going, and so her friend realized that she was no more than a backup for Julia as far as he was concerned. That was why it was easier for her to reveal what was happening. (At the same time, her mother wasn’t as religious as Julia’s, she was more open and modern. She used to wear makeup, for instance. She didn’t speak Basque, she listened to all the radio soap operas, and she let her daughter and Julia listen, as well—unlike Julia’s mother—and that must have made it easier for her friend to open up to her.) She thinks that the young version of herself must have been hurt that her friend didn’t confide in her that she intended to make the situation known. She must have felt betrayed, but she doesn’t think she minded giving up that particular way of getting pencils, and she was relieved at not having to continue seeing that revolting man. She has the idea that the fact that her friend, unlike her, told her parents what was happening made her wonder, even back then, if there was more trust in their familial relationship than in the relationship between herself and her parents, and that seemed sad to her. Her parents, too, even though they never said anything about it to her—not even a single “Why didn’t you tell us about it?”—must have drawn the same conclusion. That thought makes her sad, especially with regard to her father. She’d say it’s something that still makes her sad. The most serious consequence of what, today, would be called sexual abuse was her regretting having caused her father sorrow.