Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  The last day she went to his apartment—“the day it all happened,” as it said in Martin’s story—she was late, because she missed her usual train. In fact, even before she’d realized that Martin was watching her from out of the corner of his eye and behind the book he was holding up, she was thinking that he must be wondering where she went every day at the same time, even though she didn’t think he cared too much, and what she least expected was for him to come across the poem that the young man had sent her.

  It had been her birthday four days earlier, and she’d had the remote hope—perhaps the remote fear—that Martin would break his silence and suggest they go out for dinner. If that happened, she was going to take it as a chance to say that in spite of the inevitable delays, the work on her mother’s house was going to be over within a couple of weeks and then she’d be able to leave, but she’d say it in a civilized way, and they would become old friends, people who really appreciated each other, who were even able to tell each other about their feelings and amorous adventures. But it didn’t happen like that. The young man sent a red rose to her workplace, and a card with “The Poem of the Red Moon” written on it. She had no idea why he wrote “you are loyal, more loyal than anyone” on it—something she was going to have to hear uncountable times. It’s always nice to get flowers, even though she finds such flattery makes her feel sick, and she thought that tearing up the card would be a lack of respect.

  She put it in her bag, inside the envelope with the Villa Flores logo on it, and there it stayed, until Martin, who must have been looking for clues about where she was spending her afternoons, noticed it easily. Her bag was completely open at the top, and depending on how it was set down, it was easy to see what was inside. It couldn’t have been difficult for him to work out that the card had been sent along with some flowers; he was curious to see who’d sent them, and he held onto the card. He says that’s how it happened, but she never noticed it missing. Among other things, because she had no interest in the poem. She has sometimes wondered if that carelessness of hers wasn’t due to an unconscious desire for Martin to find out about her affair.

  Strangely enough, on “the day it all happened,” when it was so obvious that the expression on Martin’s face had changed, it took a long time for her to see the most obvious sign of all: he had hung up his pajamas and his robe. He was wearing the clothes he normally wore at home, some light shoes and an old plaid hunting jacket, clothes he could also wear outside. She remembers that she even tried to work out how old the jacket, which still looked good, was. Suddenly she was sure that he’d dressed like that in order to follow after her when she left to catch the train. She thought that must be why he looked nervous, because he’d decided to tail her and see what she did when she went out.

  When she began to suspect—rightly, as she’d soon discover—that that was what he was going to do, it occurred to her that she could take the next train, and she worked out that if she hurried out as soon as she saw it pull in and just managed to catch it, Martin wouldn’t have time to follow and get in after her. And that’s what she did. As soon as she heard the 16:55 train, she got up, ran across the garden, and in fact got to the platform quite a while before it left. So in the end, Martin did have time to get to the train, and at a brisk walk, he didn’t even have to run. He got into another carriage. She felt really bad the entire ride to the Atotxa stop. She stepped out onto the platform, and he got out of the last carriage. They both remained standing there on the platform beside their respective carriages for the two minutes the stop there lasted, but she got on again just when there was no time for anyone else to get on or off, like in action films, just before the train started up again, and once it had, she saw Martin standing there on the platform. He could have caught up with her if he wanted to, but he didn’t. He says he knew the trick she was going to pull but thought it beneath himself to get back on the train again. She went as far as Ategorrieta and backtracked from there, reaching the young man’s apartment later than usual.

  Because the railroad line, which goes over the road, passes in front of his apartment complex, at the same level as the fifth floor, which is where the young man lives, you could hear the trains go by there, too. She sometimes got to thinking about how the train she was hearing at the apartment would pass by Martin’s house a few minutes later, as well, and how he, too, would hear it; what she didn’t imagine was that Martin would later write about just that, about how the train he was hearing in Martutene had, seven or eight minutes earlier, gone past the window where she and her friend were.

  He described himself standing on the slope above the tracks, watching the window where Julia and the young man were, and she’s never dared to ask him if he really did that. After reading The Woman in a Red Jacket Sitting on the Edge of the Bed, you might think that he did, but when she got back to the house the following day, he asked her, “Who is he?” as if he knew that she’d spent the night with someone, or had worked it out, but didn’t know with whom. She finds the same to be the case with almost everything—she doesn’t know what’s real and what he’s made up. At some moments in the story, she has the impression that it did actually happen, that he’d been in the apartment itself, listening to what they were saying, and seeing what they were doing, until she realizes that what he wrote is what she told him. Back when she used to answer his questions, believing he had the right to know, without thinking how he might make use of what she said, back when she used to think it would be good for him to know, until she realized—after he spent days pestering her, asking her questions all the time, questions that seemed to be made in good faith but that, in fact, had a hidden purpose—that her answers only served to increase his need to know and his desire to later be able to throw everything he found out back in her face.

  He remains on the slope for a long time, hours standing there looking at the young man’s apartment, “wanting to embrace you when I see you at the window and feeling as though I’ve lost my arms,” waiting for her to come out of the front door and take her by the arm as if nothing’s happened and go back home together. But the time she normally goes back home has gone by, long since, and he’s shivering with cold, and then, startled by the noise of a train, he loses his balance and falls over. He moves his observation post to the front door of the building, but it soon becomes hard for him to explain what he’s doing there to the curious occupants coming and going, and so, a little after ten o’clock, he rings the young man’s bell—his plan is to announce, “I’ve come for Flora”—but there’s no answer, so he rings all the bells until someone opens the door for him, then he goes up to the fifth floor, the young man’s floor, and after knocking on his door, waits there. He stays there by the door, still thinking he’ll say “I’ve come for Flora” and that when Flora hears that, she’ll come back home with him, no doubt about it, they’ll definitely go back home together, but he wouldn’t mind if something else happened, really wouldn’t mind having to take the young man on and give him a good punch, or getting hit by him, getting the chance to tell him he’s a bad poet, but no one comes to the door, and he rings the bell again and again, knocks loudly, until finally a neighbor comes out and threatens to call the police. None of that’s true, Julia never heard anyone knocking on the door, and the young man never told her about anything like that happening. Although she did sometimes hear the bell and get startled by it, and it may be that it’s something that also made the young man nervous, because he always took the precaution of closing the living room door before answering and looking through the peephole first to buy a little extra time, but as far as she remembers, he always ended up opening the door and it would be the man from the electric company, the gas man, or a neighbor wanting to ask him something.

  In the story, after his run-in with the neighbor, he decided to go and wait on the front stoop again, putting up with the cold, until he noticed a few windows opened up and he heard a siren, which he thought must be the police, summoned by neighb
ors suspecting he was up to something, and he started running toward the center of Gros, where, breathless, he mingled in with the people coming out of the Trueba movie theater. Sometimes the story seems so pathetic that it becomes laughable. She thinks anyone else would find it comical, but she finds it sad; it makes her feel anxious, because she has the feeling that what he’s telling is true. In fact, there’s no doubt that some of the things did actually happen. She imagines he really did go back to Martutene in a taxi and wait for her in the living room.

  He waited for her all night. That is true.

  In fact, on “the day everything happened,” she told the young man that she wanted to leave early—the memory of Martin, standing there in his plaid hunting jacket and looking at her on the platform at Atotxa, was making her nervous. She felt uncomfortable and decided that it was time to sign on the dotted line of what was already a fact—the end of the relationship—and tell him that she was going to her sister’s house, because theirs was an absurd situation, but each time she said she wanted to leave, the young man held her back. “It’s so good being together right now.” And it was good being there in that apartment. It felt like a student’s apartment, but it was clean and tidy—the home of a man who knew how to live by himself. There were a few decorative, feminine touches, left behind by some previous companion, who he talked about openly, even their intimate details, without holding anything back. In fact, he talked about them more than Julia would have liked. He liked showing her photographs. He also told her about a very beautiful girl that he’d been going out with when he and Julia met but who he wasn’t seeing anymore because he felt better with her—Julia—than he ever had with anyone else. He often said that, “It’s so good being together.” She remembers him saying it with his arms folded and a look of satisfaction that she sometimes found contagious and that she at least tried not to spoil. Julia agreed to have sex, although there wasn’t much passion in it; she didn’t find him especially attractive, and less so that last day, because she’d made her decision—she wanted to get back to Martutene as soon as possible and face up to Martin.

  There were no particular complications to sex with him. Sometimes the young man would fall asleep, and she would get dressed in the dark without waking him and leave the apartment. But that day, for the first time, she, too, fell asleep. When she woke up, because of the light and the noise of the birds that had taken over a cypress tree in the street, it was seven in the morning. She got dressed in a hurry. The young man got up, as well, but he didn’t try to stop her from going. He just put his pants on and leaned against the bathroom door, barefooted, while she washed her face and combed her hair. He offered to drive her back, but she didn’t want that. She was sure she’d get there quicker by train, and just at that moment, she heard one go by. (The young man used to say that there was something romantic about the sound of a train, like ship’s whistles, something that emphasizes the mood we’re in, and he was thrilled, not put out at all, to know that Martin used to say the same thing.)

  He always went with her to the landing and waited there with her until the elevator arrived. He would always open the door for her. He’d wave goodbye to her with a fairly childish gesture, never giving her a kiss, just in case someone was looking out through a peephole. “Go back in, you’re going to catch cold,” she probably said to him that day; because they’d come out in a hurry, he was still barefoot, and she got nervous having him there in front of her while she waited for the elevator, which was as old and beautiful as it was slow—Martin described it as being made of mahogany. Clearly he’d taken the trouble of going to the building door once, using the elevator, and looking at the landings in order to gather details to illustrate where things happened, and she found that fact alone, the idea that he had gone sniffing around like a hunting dog, worrying. And there were also things that she couldn’t have told him, because she would never have been so talkative, even in her craziest moments, and even so, she’s convinced that things happened as he told them, and those things make her feel real anguish, because she has the impression that he was watching them as she said goodbye to the young man and told him to go back to bed, he was barefoot and was going to catch a cold. The young man insists on waiting with her—he tells her again and again to wait, he’ll drive her there—but she becomes more and more impatient, puts her hand on his chest, and tells him she’s made up her mind, he shouldn’t complicate things, he should go back to bed, he can sleep a little longer. Put like that, it sounds as if she resented him because due in part to him, she was now having to face up to her problems, but she doesn’t believe that was the case, at least not yet. She doesn’t think that the young man was at all worried about her facing up to Martin by herself, about him making a scene, and still less about him getting violent. She’d taken care to tell him that there was no feeling left between Martin and herself, that it was all over, and that they’d both decided to end it. What’s more, Martin was supposed to be a liberal, modern man, and nothing could have led them to think that he would be as affected as he turned out to be by her having a relationship with another man.

  She wasn’t afraid when she got out of the taxi, though she was quite nervous—she was going to have to break off the relationship once and for all. All the lights in the house, or almost all of them, were on, and that shattered her hope that Martin would still be asleep as he usually was at that time those days; lately, he was reading and writing at night, or at least trying to, and didn’t get up until well into the morning. She would have preferred him to be asleep, according to his version, in order to get rid of the young man’s smell on her skin, but she could have just gone to her sister’s house and she didn’t. She could have lied, denied that she’d had another relationship, and prevented her “infidelity” from being the reason for their splitting up, which was something that, in reality, they had already done. But she didn’t. It didn’t occur to her. She doesn’t remember seeing him when she went in, so she almost certainly walked across the living room without taking her jacket off. There was an acrid smell of cigarettes in the living room, the stench of several ashtrays full of butts, empty bottles on the tables, the signs of a wasted night, but that, she was later to find out, he had put there to decorate the scene. She walked across the living room, up the stairs, and into the bedroom, thinking he would be there, but he wasn’t; she sat on the edge of the still-made bed. She didn’t look for him or call him, she just sat there waiting for him, her jacket still on. Something made her think that the farewell was not going to be peaceful, she already felt like a disloyal woman, a woman who had come from another man’s bed, regretting that she hadn’t been braver. When he appeared in the doorway, she was still in that pathetic posture, quite downcast. “I fell asleep,” he wrote that she said, and that, too, could be true, she thinks. It could be what she actually said. Martin didn’t seem to be nervous, or down, or tired, even though it was obvious he hadn’t slept. “Who is he?” he asked, even though he knew by then, and she meekly told him his name. No more than his name. She would have felt ridiculous if she’d called him “the poet” instead of saying his name. She normally called him “the poet” on the occasions when she couldn’t resist the stupid urge to talk about her friend from the writing workshop, driven on by the happiness that feeling admired by him brought out in her, always mentioning his sentimentality and overly precious tastes, mocking him a little to cover up her feelings and for Martin not to suspect anything.

  She wasn’t surprised that the name was enough for him.

  What comes next fits in well with the facts, although there are a few details she isn’t sure about. “I’m going,” she says, unable to bear the silence, but she doesn’t get up off the bed. She stays there sitting on the bed, looking at her hands, head down, and with the deceived man standing next to her. He doesn’t speak a word, but he softly puts one of his hands on her shoulder, and on receiving that first kind gesture in such a long time, something breaks inside her, and she says, in a low
voice, “I felt abandoned.” Her pathetic appearance is reflected in the mirror, and there’s a suitcase on top of the closet. She murmurs, “I’m going,” but now it’s he who stops her from getting up. He kneels down in front of her, puts his arms around her waist, and presses his face into her lap, begging her not to leave him. It’s the very picture of pain, of sadness. She’s amazed by it, and moved to see such great desperation. Such great pain. He grabs her wrists with great strength and pushes her back onto the bed, and, just as he wrote it, possesses her, without giving her time to even take off her jacket. She remembers that she had wanted to clean herself, the idea of him ejaculating inside her right after she’d come from another man’s bed was really revolting to her. He remembers it, too. “I haven’t washed,” she must have said, and he replied that he didn’t care. That must have been how it happened, because she had the feeling, a very real physical perception, that she had the young man’s sperm in her vagina, and that Martin’s went in to join it, two sperms mixing together in her vagina—an image, the crudest image of promiscuity, which she found revolting, for herself and even more so for Martin, who had gone into the other man’s remains and dirtied himself.

  The next day, she couldn’t go to her date with the young man, because Martin didn’t leave her alone for a moment. Somehow she hinted that she would have to give him some type of explanation, so that he wouldn’t sit there waiting for her in vain, to which Martin replied, “Tell him I’m ta plus grande histoire d’amour,” as if admitting that she could have had others, but he didn’t leave her alone for a single moment, until one day, taking advantage of the fact that Martin had to go to his parents’ house, she called the young man and agreed to meet up with him, not at his apartment but at a bar in the Sagues neighborhood, to have coffee together. The young man was very understanding when she told him that Martin was her main story—a feeling the song “Ma plus grande histoire d’amour” put so well—and that they had been together many years and she couldn’t break up with him just like that. He took it well, perhaps a little too well, and he wished her happiness, even though he was skeptical about the future of her relationship with Martin, and they agreed to meet up from time to time, to carry on being good friends. Julia isn’t sure to what extent the young man’s skepticism prompted her to make a greater effort to save her relationship with Martin, but from then on, it was with it in mind that she made space in her life to spend more time with Martin, leaving her job, accepting the opportunity to translate his short stories.