The girl, on the other hand, tucks a strand of hair behind one ear, a decisive gesture that means she wants to get down to the matter at hand. She says they need to talk, and although she says it in a soft voice, almost sadly, even, it hits him like a blow. It’s a terrible sentence, one that a few other women have said to him in the past and that makes him think about how, sooner or later, inevitably, the moment of truth always arrives. Experience tells him that, in the long-term, there are no sins without punishment and that the moment of judgement and penitence is unavoidable.
Right now he feels an urge to run away that’s difficult to control; he leans against the shiny brass handrail in order to better face the onslaught. He can’t move any further back. His thoughts, as always when he feels trapped, dwell on senseless details. The cleaning staff always put so much effort into polishing the metal on the handrails, even though they don’t have time for the most basic cleaning tasks. Sure, they can talk whenever she wants—what else can he say. The girl stretches her lips a moment without actually smiling. What does he think about meeting somewhere outside the hospital, and she nods toward the exit. Looking that way, he sees a corner of a waiting room, a soda machine with brightly colored lights, a man connected to a drip sitting next to a woman who’s knitting, both of them calm. To the left there’s an empty bed at the end of the corridor. Sure, they can meet up wherever she wants.
He doesn’t find it easy to choose a place for their meeting. Abaitua doesn’t like bars, the ones he knows are noisy, uncomfortable, designed for ordering rounds of drinks, wolfing down food, and aren’t right for talking about intimate matters. And he also has to take into account the idea of being seen in public with the girl, although he’s not too worried about that. When he does think of somewhere that might be appropriate, he finds it hard to explain where it is to the girl, and finally, after a pretty absurd conversation, they agree to meet at a tavern called Mesón Portaletas. He’d told her about Portaletas when they were having dinner in Bordeaux. The sea gate in the city wall. A place to shelter if it rains. As far as the time of their meeting is concerned, he decides to set it for tomorrow, at eight, which allows him to take her out to dinner if that’s how things are going but doesn’t commit him to anything.
So that’s what we’ll do, then, the girl says—“Quedamos en eso entonces.” “En eso quedamos,” Abaitua repeats—we’ll do that—and he turns back around on the first step when he says it, because he’s already started down the stairs. He has to sort something out in Administration, he says, so that he won’t have to go past the nurses’ station with her. They are face-to-face now that Abaitua has moved down to the second step, and he can see into her eyes very clearly—they’re damp, and she has yellow sparks in her pupils, like pollen. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear with her left hand now, and this time he thinks it’s a sign of hesitation or nervousness. Then she puts her hand on the brass handrail. Abaitua has his right hand on the handrail, and, leaning on it, he moves his head forward a little. He thinks saying goodbye with a kiss is the right thing to do, he doesn’t want her to think he’s being distant. A sign of weakness, as befits a weak man like him. “A kiss,” he says, moving his head forward, and the girl, too, moves forward, but further, to face the stairwell, offering him her right cheek, which is a gesture Abaitua thinks overly genteel, and his lips don’t touch her skin, he feels held back by that gesture of hers denying him her mouth; he hurries down another step, and he can clearly see how desolated the girl looks, but he ignores it, turns his back on her, starts going down the stairs, running down them, not stopping, even though the girl calls out his name twice.
Stolen kisses. Those girls back in his day, the ones who wanted to be sure of boys’ intentions, and who administered their charms with merciless cruelty. They weren’t going to give out sex in exchange only for sex, they made it very clear that it was something they weren’t interested in, and at best they would “let them do it to them”—that’s how they put it—only when the guy agreed to commit himself to a lasting relationship. He understands the reasons behind that behavior, of course. There were many things to be concerned about, not least pregnancy, and the fact that guys tended to look down on girls who agreed to sex as a matter of course, because they were “easy.” Perhaps the girls’ attitude led him to be less sincere than he should have been, to use twisted strategies that made him feel guilty, to the extent that he sometimes saw himself as a wolf on the prowl for innocent creatures, to see sex not as something fun or playful, as a way of having a relationship with another person, but as foul, animal impulse he should repent for every time he managed to get some. The priests couldn’t have put it better when they said that ten minutes of pleasure led to an eternity in flames.
There’s even a joke about it: The astonished girl says to the priest, “Ten whole minutes?”
Pilar is reading the newspaper. He isn’t sure if she’s wearing the same scrubs she had been in the morning. These ones are a pale violet color. He asks her how lunch with Loiola went, and the answer is, “We didn’t have lunch.” Apparently, their son had something he had to do, and they postponed their meeting for another day.
To break the silence, Abaitua tells her they have a thirty-year-old woman who went into septic shock as the result of a clandestine abortion and then not being operated on soon enough. “In this day and age,” says Pilar. It’s clear she’s not very interested in the subject.
On the television, there’s a couple sitting behind a kind of school desk. They must be around fifty, and their appearance is far from refined. (The woman, in particular, has very neglected teeth.) They each have a nametag stuck on their chest. Paco and Juana. The presenter asks them questions, and they take turns answering. Abaitua has seen the show before. Prizes are given to the couples that know each other best, they have to give an answer matching the one their partner has written on a board and kept hidden from them. They kiss each other gently on the lips and applaud when they get it right.
Pilar looks up at the screen when he gives her his opinion about the teeth you tend to see on television. He doesn’t think they match Spain’s overall economic development. Just at that moment, the man is flipping his board around and showing what he’s written on it: “Que se ponga ropa interior más sexy.” He wants her to wear sexier underwear. They give each other a kiss.
They could talk about whether such a show would be possible on Basque television. They would conclude that it wasn’t. “Fortunately, don’t you think?” He could argue either side, but he would probably end up being the one to defend the positive side of the matter: they, Basques, don’t have that easy openness, they’re much quicker to feel embarrassed.
What most surprises him is seeing people of more or less his own age, who were therefore subject to the same repression he was and who on top of that never had the same opportunities he did to access a more open world (when it came down to it, he went to Paris and read Modern Sexual Techniques and Le Nouvel Observateur in 1968), shedding their inhibitions to an extent that would be unthinkable for him, not just in front of a television camera but even in the intimacy of his own bedroom.
The woman’s written “Bailarle el baile de los siete velos” on her board—she would do the Dance of the Seven Veils for him. She holds her hand in front of her mouth to hide her teeth when she laughs.
“You should call him yourself,” Pilar says, right after Abaitua says goodnight. Obviously, she’s talking about Loiola. It seems as if they haven’t said a single word to each other since he came in, since she told him that the two of them didn’t meet up for lunch in the end. He remains silent in order for her to explain what he thinks she wants to tell him. Her words are failing her. Apparently she’s afraid that something might happen to him, someone might want to get back at him for not being in prison with the rest of them. She says she would feel better if he could go back to the States, at least until the trial is over. What can he say to her? Basically, that he thinks
her worries are unfounded, but that he’ll speak with him and try to convince him.
He’s in bed with the light off, even though it’s too early for him to go to sleep. He’s remembering Lynn’s gesture—offering him her cheek and twisting her lips in the other direction like an old woman. And he doesn’t mind having gone down the stairs without turning back when she called his name. He wonders if she might have interpreted his behavior as a cancellation of their appointment. He wished that were so.
He doesn’t want to think about Lynn.
He hears Pilar’s usual noises from the bathroom next door. The sound of the electric toothbrush going up and down the hallway at intervals. The sound of the various pots of lotion being set down on the shelf. He remembers how soft her skin was the first time they made love. An exact memory of her skin’s softness and freshness. It never occurred to him that they might make love in that Ford Taurus as soon as they arrived from Zaragoza, the day after they met each other. Reaching that objective usually required several months of complicated preliminary maneuvers. He was amazed at how receptive she was; the young men at the time were programmed for being stopped by the girls, otherwise they would fulfil their biological destiny, which was to go all the way. Pilar had wanted to maintain her dignity, it seems, and live up to the expectations of a progressive man of Abaitua’s age. That was how she lost her virginity, by believing that there was no place for excessive modesty with a dyed-in-the-wool leftist man such as himself.
His first time with a woman.
11
Julia looks at the mess, the same one she finds in the living room every morning. Piled-up books, and on top of the piles of books, glasses, plates with scraps of fruit on them, yogurt containers, dirty little bits of kitchen paper everywhere. Sheets of newspaper spread out. His index cards get everywhere, they’re on chairs and on the floor, rather like a plague. His output of index cards is in inverse proportion to the number of words he puts into his story—the more cards he fills in, the less he writes. She picks up a handful of them and tries to decipher them. She understands little more than the odd word. Two quotes from Botho Strauss on the same card: “The Mohave Indians”—she thinks it says Mohave—“usually carry on talking even long after the person they are talking with has gone away.” “It’s today again. What part of what whole?”
The main character in The Man in Front of the Mirror had woken up with that phrase in his head the day before—“It’s today again.” The weather was good, and he didn’t feel bad, no pain; two nights before it had been torture taking a piss, and now there was no trace of those horrible spasms, which had become a far-off, pleasant memory. (He likes bringing his suffering to mind, it allows him to enjoy the awareness of no longer feeling any pain). Even the concierge’s wife, who’d been looking at him with pity recently, although charitably holding back the obvious comments she usually made, said he was looking healthy today. He thought he looked good, as well. When he put his hand on his forehead and brushed his hair back, he even thought he saw some new hairs there, fine ones, almost transparent. The dermatologist assured him that hair loss isn’t the main worry when it comes to going bald, and he’s certainly losing hair, as he can see every time he washes it down the drain—hair is supposed to fall out, in the same way that leaves fall off trees. The main worry is hair not growing back, no new hair growing; he doesn’t want to lose the hope that he does have some soft new hair, and he checks to see that it isn’t an optical illusion created by the light flooding in. After eating breakfast eagerly, he decides to go for a walk through the neighborhood around the hospital. He often does that when the weather’s good, even though it’s uphill on the way there. He walks around the hospital complex and often goes as far as the research park. Sometimes, though, he goes into the hospital and walks along the corridors, has a drink in the cafeteria, which is usually full of very noisy people, or even goes to sit in the outpatient surgery lounge when there’s a free spot; it’s usually as busy as the cafeteria, even though it isn’t as noisy right now. It does him good to spend time there, with none of the anguish he feels when he has an appointment, no need to worry about whether he should knock on the door or wait for the nurse to come out and call his name, and above all, no need to worry about what expression he’s going to see on the doctor’s face after spending several anxious minutes watching him or her sift through a pile of files looking for his test results.
He feels comfortable among that group of patients and the people who’ve come to the hospital with them, he looks at them with curiosity, not having anything to worry about himself. As if he himself were healthy.
He’s just gone for a walk around the Maternity and Pediatric Ward, following the blue line on the floor, and he stopped at a large window to look at the rows of newly born babies, which also made him feel better, improved his mood for some imperceptible, idiotic reason. In Orthopedics, he sees people plastered up, they’re past the worst and usually very lively. He avoids Infectious Diseases, for obvious reasons, and Internal Medicine, as well, afraid that some doctor or other might recognize him. He goes to Cardiology. It’s completely calm there. He thinks visitors there must be very strictly controlled, unlike in Orthopedics, to make sure that when patients are discharged, they get the tranquility they need—they’re not up to much celebrating. He sits down on one of the chairs lined up against the wall at the end of the corridor, next to a couple of patients and their visitors. The patients are easy to distinguish, because of their gowns, but he would know who they were anyway, even if they were wearing their street clothes. The patients are men and the visitors are women, their wives, in fact, as he quickly deduces from their conversations. At that moment, one of the patients admits that he’s not looking forward to going home, he feels safer at the hospital. He says being more than two steps away from a defibrillator makes him afraid. The four of them recall the day they first came to the emergency room, and while he listens to them talking about the alarming symptoms, the fear of arriving too late, and the tests the man had to go through, he suddenly feels like dropping in at the ER.
While he wets his face in the washbasin in a restroom just outside the entrance to ER, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to go in yet. In the mirror, his face looks worse than it did in the morning, he doesn’t know if it’s because of the light or because he’s nervous, and he doesn’t even look to see if the new little hairs on his forehead had been an illusion or not. He doesn’t plan his next move. In the ER reception area, he tells the first person he sees walking by in a white coat that he’s feeling bad. Without being too dramatic about it. He’s broken into a sweat, he’s dizzy, he feels a pain in his heart, and he has pins and needles in his left arm. As they take him away in a wheelchair, he feels something shake in his heart, the excitement caused by the role he’s playing, he imagines. He feels sure about his heart. In fact, it’s the only internal organ he doesn’t have any reason to worry about. His pulse has always been stable, and he tends to have low blood pressure. He tells that to the nurse who’s putting suction pads on him to run an electrocardiogram. She’s around sixty and is wearing blue latex gloves (he wonders whether she wears the same pair of gloves all day and touches everything with them). It’s a small, dark room. There’s just enough space for the stretcher, a small table, and the EKG machine, and the only window faces out onto a wall that can be no further than three feet away. He says to the nurse that it must be hard to spend eight hours a day in that miserable little room putting suction pads onto sick bodies such as his and then taking them off again. The woman smiles at him with gratitude. He doesn’t know the half of it. She admits that sometimes, when she leaves, she feels disorientated, mixed up, and often walks all the way down to the city just to clear her head. The man commiserates with her, it isn’t a very nice street to walk down with all that traffic. That leads him to the subject of Donostia, and he talks about how it’s being drowned in concrete and cement while the device he’s connected to noisily scrapes along the pap
er. The man is enjoying talking, and so is the woman, he can tell. The man says that Mount Urgull is an oasis in the city, a paradise that few people visit, and the nurse admits it’s been years since she last went there, but this weekend she’ll go and she’ll think of him. She asks him if he’s nervous, putting a hand on his shoulder—a gloved hand, the man is pleased to see. He says no, he feels fine, and it’s true. There’s a vase on the Formica-topped table with several many-petalled white flowers in it—they look like chrysanthemums. He decides he’s going to send her a bunch of flowers.
A bunch of flowers.
He writes various notes under that heading:
A man is going to jump from a sixth-floor balcony. He’s holding a bunch of flowers firmly in his right hand. He decides not to let go of it, he wants the bunch of flowers with him when he hits the ground. He holds them with great concentration, like a pole-vaulter in a stadium readying himself to break a record.
The man goes into the room where his wife is receiving hospice care. They’ve just given her Dormicum to sedate her. She lies there with her eyes closed, calm, her skin white like wax, more beautiful than ever, like Atala. La belle morte. A large bunch of red roses at the head of her bed. On the card: “I will love you forever. Juan.” The man, who is not called Juan, has never given his wife a bunch of flowers.
The man goes into a florist’s, planning to send one of his coworkers a bunch of flowers for her birthday. They get on well together, but he’s never dared to tell her that he’s in love with her. There’s another customer in front of him, a tall, elegant man who’s giving precise instructions for how he wants his bouquet made up. It’s obvious he knows a lot about flowers. He chooses them with care, calling each flower by its name—petunias, gladioli, jasmine. As the florist is putting the bunch together for him, he gets her to take a few of the flowers out, because they don’t look good in the arrangement. He gives her his business card and tells her where to send the bouquet. It’s for his coworker. He doesn’t know what to do when his turn comes and ends up asking for a plant that’s not too expensive, a geranium, to give to his mother.
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