Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  “¿Qué te parece?”

  That wasn’t the end of the story. She was completely depressed when she left the travel agency—“I had no hope whatsoever”—and she started wandering around with no particular destination in mind—“no hope whatsoever, truly hopeless,” she added for Lynn—when, after crossing just a couple of streets, her phone rang. “I want to give you another chance.” A man’s voice said it to her, and for a moment, she thought she was going to faint. The man didn’t tell her his name when she asked who he was, instead he asked her—or ordered her, really—to wait for him in the bar at the nearby Hotel Ercilla—he’d be there in ten minutes. And how will I know who you are? He said she shouldn’t worry about that.

  She spends more than ten minutes describing the situation, even though all three of them, who are curious, ask her to tell them what happened once and for all. A description of the bar, soft armchairs, the dark lighting, men standing around in suits, the type of men that look like they follow bullfighting, a couple of good-looking women very elegantly dressed and made-up, perhaps excessively so—a nervous scene, exciting, even, for a woman by herself. Her nerves, her emotions, her heart like an unbridled horse, incapable of thinking. She orders a gin and tonic, something she hasn’t drunk since before the Holocene Epoch. Then the man appears. He’s young, around thirty, quite good-looking, his black hair slicked back with shiny hair gel, he’s wearing a burgundy-red jacket and a blue tie with the red and yellow of the Spanish flag on it in narrow, diagonal stripes. He has a gold-colored nametag on his lapel: Adolfo Aróstegui. That’s what he tells her when he sits down in the armchair next to hers, he’s Adolfo Aróstegui, he works at the airline, he’s heard what happened, he understands the situation very well and wants to help her. Harri orders another gin and tonic, and drinking it down in one gulp makes her feel very good. The young man, like the office manager shortly before, asks if she doesn’t remember what seat the man had sat in, putting another 727 seating plan in front of them with a cross where she had sat. The young man makes her feel more relaxed, he’s more patient than his boss had been, is at least able to narrow down the area he must have been sitting in to a dozen seats, and the young man says that’s enough to go on, that information will save them a lot of work. The young man is very considerate, and he has a nice voice. The voice of an accomplice. He, too, is very much aware of the magic of unexpected meetings, and you can see he’s being sincere by the way he looks at her. How did he know she was the woman who was offering the second opportunity? Because he knows about women. He says it without puffing himself up. What’s more, the obvious thing would have been to call the person who had written the message in the book and tell her that the man had lost it. Elementary. His boss hadn’t thought of that, because, like most bosses, he was an idiot. Harri is embarrassed that she herself never realized that her strategy had that small error in it, but finally she laughs with the young man as they imagine what would have happened if the office manager had been smarter and had called the number on the dedication page of the book and her phone had rung right there in front of everyone at the airline counter.

  “¿Qué te parece?”

  The gin and tonic was flowing easily though her veins, and she enjoyed telling the young man about her meeting with the man at the airport when he asked her to tell him the real story in full detail. He listened to her with great interest. The young man was the very opposite of the type of men she likes, she says—in fact, he must have been somewhere there at the airline counter when she was, but she hadn’t noticed him—he looked right-wing and vain, with that gel in his hair and the Spanish flag on his tie. A bit overly touchy, one of those people who are always putting their hand on your shoulder and moving their faces too close to yours. She was a little bit dizzy and completely relaxed there in that comfortable armchair at the Hotel Ercilla, leaning far back in the intimate semi-darkness; then the young man said he had to go back to work. He said once more that he would do everything he could to give her a second chance, he would call her as soon as he found something out, and then he went, and she was left alone, happy, her heart full of good sensations.

  “Qué te parece.”

  This time, the way she says it, without the intonation of a question, makes it a full stop. And it’s late. The writer says that as he stands up, patting the inside and outside pockets of his jacket, or rather, the parts of his anatomy where those pockets would be if he were dressed, and the front and back pockets of his pants, which is what he always does whether what he’s looking for would fit into them or not. For some reason that Julia can’t fathom, he does the same thing when he wants to go somewhere, it’s his way of saying that he has no choice in the matter. On this occasion, he says he’s running late and has to go to Hernani and buy a puff pastry tart at Adarraga. They’re old fashioned tarts, made using good butter, and his family is addicted to them. He tells Lynn that she has to try them, even though they’re very rich and filling, and, suddenly enthusiastic, he suggests she come and meet his family, “a meeting that might be of great anthropological interest,” (Julia doesn’t know why he says things like that in English), but the girl says she isn’t sure how much time she’s going to have. Martin presses her; he’d be pleased if a busload of tourists came along, anything to make sure the conversation at the table didn’t revolve around personal or family matters, anything to keep his mother entertained, to keep the atmosphere from getting too intense. Julia being there is no longer enough to guarantee that lunch will go by with relative normality and without anyone getting angry.

  Julia takes a deep breath before going into Martin’s parents’ house, in the same way she would fill her lungs with air before diving into the water. She really feels like some out of place element there. Everything is dark, closed, heavy. The furniture, the carpets, the wallpaper, the paintings hanging from the walls, the atmosphere that sticks to the walls. The mahogany table with its gray marble cover, the cut crystal sweet wine glasses, the soggy Adarragaren tart, the porcelain place settings with the baroque designs. Their first duty, almost before introducing anyone, is to speak about Father, without worrying about him sitting there smiling, as if he weren’t there, to discuss his senility, his incontinence, the need to have two people to look after him at all times. Martin’s mother raises her hands to her temples, which she then massages with the tips of her fingers, just as her son does when he complains about his nightmares. Or the other way around, rather—he does it exactly the way his mother does. She says she can’t take any more, she’s exhausted, as if it were she herself cleaning him, feeding him, and putting him to bed. Good Lord, Good Lord, she keeps saying. She’s thin, tall, large-boned. Her hands, above all, look huge, which is an impression that’s increased, perhaps, by the arthritis that’s deforming her joints. She wears little jewelry, but the little she does is unmissable: an enormous ring with a huge stone on her little finger; a thick gold bracelet, which looks like an anchor chain; a pearl necklace that goes around her neck four times. Curiously, wearing so much gold does not stop her from looking austere, it does not seem to embellish her; it’s a sign of status, quite simply. She has thick gray hair that’s lightly sprayed, combed up, and held in a bun. Her nose is pronounced, her eyes small, and her mouth delicate. Julia knows from old photos that she was beautiful as a young woman, and Martin and his sister think of her as a great beauty. They don’t take after her.

  Martin’s sister, the eldest, the one who humorously refers to herself as the old maid, usually gives Julia clothes. Good clothes, ones she’s hardly ever worn, or hasn’t worn at all, and thinks don’t look good on her, but all the garments are very classical and not to Julia’s liking. Every time she goes to the house, the sister takes her to her room as though it were some secret between the two of them and gets her to try something on. Everything looks good on her. Sometimes she puts that down to having “a poor person’s body.” Today Julia’s wearing a printed Hermès scarf, so that the sister won’t think she doesn’t
appreciate her gifts. In fact, she likes being given used clothes, just like Frisch with his friend W., and the only problem is that, not being her style, she doesn’t feel comfortable when she wears them. She usually tells her they’ll be wasted on her, she won’t ever wear them, but the sister doesn’t give up and insists, telling her that she has to take the things, because they’re Prada, Loewe, or Gucci. What’s more, the reasons she offers for passing her clothes on are wholly reasonable and never make her feel like she’s in debt to her—it’s Julia who’s doing her a favor by taking them off her hands. The sister feels guilty about keeping clothes that she doesn’t wear in her closet, and giving them away means that she can buy new things. Of course, she recognizes the Hermès scarf, and she pulls it down over her shoulders—Julia just had it tied around her neck—and says it looks great on her.

  Je m’en souviens—I remember. In that house, with its gloomy atmosphere, Julia used to keep herself amused by talking with Martin’s father. They would sit out on the enclosed balcony off the living room and look out over the Alderdi Eder gardens and the bay. She found the old man entertaining; even though he was a long way gone from reality, he was able to talk about his own worlds with coherence and a great amount of detail. More so than people who hadn’t lost their minds, as if not being completely stuck in the present made it easier for him to situate himself in whatever place and time they happened to be talking about. But it’s obvious he’s gotten much worse since she last saw him. He gives her a foolish-looking smile. He speaks to her in Basque, as affectionately as he can, and in French when he talks about things that happened in his childhood, when they were exiled in Hazparne, which is his favorite subject. “J’étais un exilé, moi, that’s the truth.” He normally laughs when he says that. They had to go into exile because his mother’s family were Basque nationalists, in fact his uncle was a member of parliament for the EAJ—the Basque nationalist Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea party—a friend of the famed and ill-fated Jesús Galindez, also exiled under Franco. Apparently he’s even mentioned in one of his books—he put his own life in danger by saving a large number of people from the Reds, particularly priests and nuns and right-wing folk, including some fifth columnists, in Donostia as well as in Madrid. His own father—Martin’s grandfather—on the other hand, was from a liberal family, enterprising people, professional people (both of them, father and son, were civil engineers), with a lot of money but of no political significance. The old man’s father must have been a republican, although he was also a Basque culture enthusiast, like Martin’s father, and like him, he spoke the basic Basque that he had learned from his wet nurses, and he was a great pilota player. He’d taken charge of organizing the exile of a large part of his wife’s family; although they were from an old, illustrious Bizkaian line, they had little economic wealth. Martin’s father used to speak ironically about his mother’s family’s contradictions, their being so nationalistic and yet none of them speaking Basque, being so far removed from the canons of Basque tradition—whether nationalistic or otherwise—which his father, on the other hand, so typified, in his habits, his loyalties, and his code of honor. The old man thought that his mother’s family’s nationalism, and his wife’s, too, amounted to little more than folklore, and he used to joke about his extended family’s enthusiasm for Bizkaia: they were very nice, and well-learned, even, but terrible parasites, and he used to say that they would have stayed in exile in Hazparne forever if his father hadn’t decided to come and get his houses and businesses back. It was curious that he, too, Martin’s father himself, had done the same thing when he married, because his wife’s family was also a traditional nationalist mainstay—they had their family seat in Bergara and were related, they said, to Telesforo Monzón, the great folk leader himself—and they had come down in the world and were now, among other socioeconomic incoherences, no longer skilled at speaking the language; in the case of Martin’s mother, for instance, her Basque was scarcely good enough to allow her to converse with maids, small children, and dogs.

  Martin’s mother is telling the American girl that the house in Martutene, in which Martin lives now, used to be the family’s summer home, back when going to the beach wasn’t thought of as all that attractive an idea and swimming in the sea wasn’t considered particularly healthy. Things the girl already knows, because the woman’s son has told her: the current owners of the building now housing the San Luis Clinic had stolen it from them—an accusation his father never mentions—and the Goytisolos were all a bunch of evil Carlists. She sticks in words and short sentences in English from time to time. It’s to practice, she says. She normally does the same thing with Basque, dotting in little phrases here and there. Her use of that linguistic resource, which writers often employ to show that a conversation is actually being held in a language other than the one it’s written in, probably results in her believing that she is, in fact, conversing in English.

  In any case, she keeps on talking. She’s giving Lynn the recipe for Adarraga tarts, which the poor girl writes down in her black notebook as if she were a hard-working student. The mother says they often used to make them at home, because they had a pastry cook who worked at the Adarraga shop before being employed at their home, and she stayed working in their kitchen for many years. She married when she was quite old, and both of her sons ended up in prison. “There’s been a lot of suffering here. Very, very much,” she says. “This one grew up in exile”—she points at her husband—“and this one”—pointing to her son—“was in prison for collaborating with ETA. Back when ETA was something different. He’s already told you that, I suppose.” The girl says yes, she knows about it, probably because the signs that Martin is making at her—raising his chin and stretching his neck out as if some invisible tie around his collar were too tight for him—lead her to think that he finds the subject uncomfortable and that agreeing with her is the best way to get the old lady to stop talking about it.

  Martin’s father, on the other hand, is actually wearing a tie. And a brown suit, which is quite loose on him. He looks thin now, but he hadn’t just a few months earlier. Short hair, crew cut, gray, but plentiful, so Martin can’t tell him he’s going bald. His eyes are very light colored, like his son’s, but they aren’t cold, perhaps because he’s always looking into the distance. It’s obvious he isn’t following the conversation, and he smiles in a slightly absent way when people look at him. When Lynn asks about the trophies on the mantel, he picks up one of the paddles resting against the wall and reads, “35-22 over Balda and Baleztenari.” He picks it up in his right hand—it must weigh a ton—holds it upright with his arm outstretched behind him, and then brings it around in front of him, balancing it on his open palm in an easy, elastic, aesthetically pleasing gesture. Then Martin’s mother shouts for someone to take the racket out of his hands, he’ll break something, and Martin has to use a lot of force to get it off him. It’s an unpleasant scene.

  Now that the old man has spun around, he’s completely disorientated, and he leans forward, with his arms held out wide, and Julia thinks that he wants to sit down and so she offers him a chair, but Martin’s sister quickly moves to take the chair off her. “That one isn’t his,” she says, and the old man almost falls over, because he’d already started to sit down on it. The sister says he’s been having “more and more accidents,” explaining that she moved that one to protect the seat’s upholstery, and her mother says it’s “just a mess, a lamentable situation.” Martin’s sister looks just like him. She’s beautiful. A large woman, like Harri, still shy of fifty. She tends to support her mother’s points of view and statements and provide evidence to support them. She’s also the one who gets the stories started. “Tell them what he did in front of the girls the other day. Tell them what he did with the custard.” Just as Martin does. They tell a long series of sad little stories—they’re quite depressing, in fact, even though some of them are quite funny, as well, such as him taking off his diaper and putting it on his head—switching off
turns as if it were a competition; all the while, the old man is looking at the light coming in from the enclosed balcony and Martin’s doing that gesture of his that makes it look as if he’s trying to loosen a tie that he isn’t wearing. It’s obvious he doesn’t like them telling people these things about his father, and he tries, rather pathetically, to change the subject by asking suddenly, and with great enthusiasm, if they know why you pour the tea into the milk and not the other way around, and his mother, after asking who could possibly think something as stupid as that, carries on with her stories. They’ve had to reupholster all the chairs—“absolutely all of them”—because there were traces of urine on them. It really was embarrassing when they realized. Doesn’t she think it’s a terrible punishment, she says to Lynn, and she says she does, and what a trial, she says, looking at Julia now, and the two younger women have difficulty not laughing.