Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  One of the situations they describe reminds her of something Simone de Beauvoir writes about in The Farewell Ceremony. Beauvoir mentions the stains that the philosopher often left on the upholstery of the chairs and says that once, in Rome in ‘72, when they were walking back from the Pantheon, poor Sartre tried to explain away the wetness on his pants by saying that a couple of cats had just pissed on him—“des chats viennent de me pisser dessus.” Back when she read it, she thought, as Martin is thinking now, that it was something there was no need to tell, and that it was ill-intentioned to do so. A little act of vengeance on the part of Beauvoir, who must have had plenty of reasons for it. Julia doesn’t know what she would think if she read it again now, but she imagines her memory of that passage helped her to find the figure of the writer more approachable, more loveable than the writer who used to sign everything the Maoists put in front of him and allow himself to be bowled over by any student kind enough to light his pipe for him. She thinks that Simone de Beauvoir loved him dearly. But she still finds the scene in which she asks to be left alone with Sartre’s corpse and then lies down beside it and falls asleep worrying. She knows the final sentences by memory: Sa mort nous sépare. Ma mort ne nous réunira pas. C’est ainsi; il est déjà beau que nos vies aient pu si longtemps s’accorder—His death separates us. My death will not bring us back together. That’s the way it is and it is fine enough that our lives have been lead together for so long.

  Harri often says that she’s just like that Simone woman, and also, as she told her a little earlier, that she’s embittered.

  She’d rather be at home reading a book.

  “Oroitzen al zara Hazparnez?”—Do you remember Hazparne? The old man’s eye light up—“Bien sûr, je m’en souviens”—as he replies that of course he remembers. Julia has never been to Hazparne and doesn’t think she ever will, because she knows she would be disappointed. She has a mental image, which is false, of course, of good-looking young men like Ravel dressed in white linen clothes, the girls wearing floral-print dresses, sitting on blankets in a circle, in green fields under cherry trees, around baskets full of white bread, Beloke cheese, good pâté, and Baiona ham. The older men are looking for field mushrooms. There are boys wearing berets and playing pilota against the church wall “tandis qu’un crépuscule verdâtre agonise derrière les fenêtres”—while the greenish twilight expires behind its windows. A Finzi-Contini garden scene, almost, with a Basque Coast touch. That’s what everything she’s heard about the exile in that house makes her think of, that image—nothing to do with what she’s heard about her uncles, two on her father’s side and two on her mother’s side, who lived just a few miles from Hazparne, making a living cutting down pine trees in Les Landes while waiting for their chance to board a cargo ship out of there, Luis and Tomas to Argentina, Joxe Miel and Jesús to Venezuela.

  “Bien sûr, je m’en souviens,” the old man says again, his eyes lighting up once more. Julia’s seen things similar to what Martin’s father always tells them about in many movies, and has read about them in many books, but his story always breaks her heart for some reason, it’s his story that moves her especially. Perhaps it’s because she realizes that she’s looking at the child who witnessed the scene himself. “Je m’en souviens du bruit des bottes des allemands,” he usually whispers—I remember the sound of the Germans’ boots—and at that moment, she thinks that she, too, can hear the frightful noise that had terrified the boy. Although it was something that happened often. He talks about how the town would be thrown into a frenzy all of a sudden, you could hear the echo of people coming together during the German occupation. The boy goes up to them to find out what the noise is all about and sees, between two rows of local people who are shouting insults, a group of men and women pushing forward a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl with her hair cut short. They’ve found her with a German soldier in the woods, and they are angry. But what’s heard above all the terrible insults and demands for cruel punishment is an indignant man’s voice next to him, and the old man now opens his eyes very wide and murmurs again and again the thing that had most affected him: “Elle était à poil”—she was naked. As if that were the worst fact in all the war.

  Why is he so moved when he tells them about that scene?

  In fact, what he’s talking about is his awakening to sex, which is something as moving as the worst realities of war for many children. Julia regrets not having talked about that with the old man while she could have. She thinks that now—now that she can’t—is when she might have been able to. Does she tend to regret more things she’s done, or things she hasn’t done?

  The old man smiles again. His smile seems ageless somehow. In other words, it’s easy not to take his age into account when he smiles. His smile is pleasant, happy, a little cheeky, as well. When Lynn says that he looks very good for his age, Martin’s mother says that he still has all his own teeth, perhaps a bit contemptuously, or perhaps with envy, because she herself has false teeth and maybe she thinks she would make better use of her original teeth than he does. That’s what it seems like to Julia. Then she thinks that it’s his teeth that make her forget his age when he smiles. His hand, however, is that of an old person. He puts it on her knee; it’s cold, long, very white, and with fine skin so delicate that she thinks she would tear it if she touched it with the tip of her finger. She takes it in her own hand, not wanting the old man’s gesture to be misinterpreted, although she knows she’s running the risk of being overly genteel.

  Martin’s mother: “You have to be with him day and night.”

  They don’t touch each other. At least, Martin and his mother don’t; she has sometimes seen the daughter giving her mother a kiss on the cheek. In fact, Julia herself would never take the mother’s hands into her own in the same way she has just taken ahold of the father’s. She’s convinced that Martin likes her being affectionate with his father, just as he likes saying that she’s his father’s favorite. She, too, thinks that his father has always liked her; he thinks she’s beautiful, but above all, he likes her because she comes from a world different from his own, a world he admires, because she comes from the world of Basque working people, she belongs to the type of people he has always known and respected, serious men and women who run their homes well. He’s sometimes told her that he’s proud of her, that she’s the best possible match his clumsy, stuck-up son could possibly have. (His wife, too, who has now lost any hope for her son, doesn’t think she’s a bad match, knowing that Martin’s peculiarities and lack of relationship skills make him a low-value product.) “Now that’s a proper lunch.” Sometimes Julia lies to him to keep her image up. For instance, when he asks her what she’s going to have for lunch, and always with the idealized image of pots bubbling away on top of an old-fashioned stove in mind, Julia often makes something up: black beans with cabbage and blood sausage; beef with tomato and red pepper sauce; cod in a green sauce with potatoes and fresh peas. And he smiles with pleasure—now that’s a proper meal.

  When they start suggesting that they’re going to have to go soon, the reproaches begin. Mother and sister ask Martin for information. Is he writing? They don’t see him on the television or in the newspaper, and they do see Alberdi on the other hand, every day. Julia feels sorry for him, he’s like a child who gets angry because he’s gotten bad grades at school, and she sees him moving around nervously in his chair. He has no interest whatsoever in going on television, he defends himself. And it’s true. In fact, she’s sure that on the occasions on which he’s made a great effort and taken some Propranolol before going on to some show, it’s been for their sake. She knows he’s sorry that they feel frustrated on his behalf, that he’d like to give them reasons to be proud, for their acquaintances to say that they’ve seen him on the television or in the newspaper, and for people they don’t know to ask them if they’re related to the writer when they give their names, which, it seems, has in fact happened to them sometimes. But he can’t.
He complains that it isn’t fair that writers and artists have to be good not only at their work but also at selling it and being affable and photogenic (opera singers can no longer be fat, he always says). But his mother and sister pay no attention. What’s the good of being a writer if nobody reads you? He should go on the television more. Julia has to bite her tongue to stop herself from saying that there’s not much point in him being well-known, since they haven’t read a single line of his. (She knows that Martin isn’t bothered by that. Quite the opposite, in fact, he probably couldn’t write at all if he knew that someone from the family was going to read it.)

  Lynn is more loyal. She tells them that Martin needs all his energy for writing. It’s moving. Her voice shakes a little, and she makes that gesture she does when she’s nervous, tucking her hair behind her ears. She says she knows people who are interested in literature and who think a lot of Martin’s work, and the old lady, interrupting her, asks if she knows a lot of people here. She doesn’t ask it ironically—as Lynn, who feels she has to admit that she doesn’t know all that many people, might think—but because she would really like to know what type of friends the American girl has, if, that is, she actually has any. Martin, too, prefers to take the conversation in that direction, and holding on to the slight pretext the American girl has offered, he says that she has mysterious friends who whisk her away on weekend trips, before realizing that that line of conversation will take them back to Bordeaux. Because now his mother wants to know where she went, and of course, when she hears Bordeaux mentioned, she’s reminded of the bad memories about when her son was in trouble there and they had to visit him in prison and they managed to get him out thanks to her Paris daughter’s contacts, and speaking of her, Martin has to repay the favor by getting her a suite in the María Cristina Hotel—Martin quickly promises he’ll do all he can, even though it’s going to be hard with the Zinemaldia festival going on—and then she says, for the American girl’s benefit, because she’s already told Julia as much plenty of times, that they’ve always had to get Martin out of trouble, like the time they found a box full of ikurriñas he was supposed to give out shoved under his bed, and they, mother and daughter, had to go, along with their two maids, and distribute them in the market, and the parish church, and wherever else they could. “Do you remember?” the mother asks her daughter from time to time; to which she replies, “Do I ever.” (And one time, when Julia hears that “do you remember?” of hers, she thinks for some reason that she’s going to ask “do you remember that time I caught you masturbating in the library?” and then she has to make a great effort not to burst out laughing.)

  “Now where’s he gone off to?” says Martin’s mother, as if her husband might have gone to the moon, and at that same exact moment, he appears in the doorway. One of the legs of his pants is soaking wet from his fly to his knee, she makes her typical gesture of disgust and says, “Goodness, goodness, what’s he done now?” and he complains that one of the faucets in the bathroom is too tightly closed and, because of that, he’s gotten all wet. Mother and daughter leap up together to stop him from sitting down and cry out “Belen! Itziar!” and the two maids rush in, shyly greet everyone there, and sweep the old man away with them. It all happens in an instant.

  Julia is sorry that Lynn has had to meet Martin’s father like that, that she didn’t get to meet him when he had his intelligent eyes, when the man was still attractive, as she once knew him to be. He used to say that he was only any good for making money. Perhaps his intelligence deserved a better fate than looking after the family’s wealth, but he, like his father before him, had accepted the task with humility. It meant that others could spend their time on more noble callings, and even though he must have had reason to think that those others didn’t come through on their part of the implicit deal—his writer son is the only one in the family who’s created anything—he doesn’t seem to have held it against anyone.

  Finally it’s the mother and daughter who show them out of the house. “It’s lovely being with you, but you must have other things to do.” As Martin predicted, they’re getting them to leave before the television show they’re addicted to starts. “Take care of yourself,” Martin’s mother tells him, as she folds his shirt collar over his jacket collar, “if you don’t want to end up like your father.” And then she says to Lynn, “He is like his father, they don’t take care of themselves, his father never has.” And to Martin again, “And you started much earlier.” She turns a flushed cheek toward Julia for her to kiss it and says, “Take care of him.” And Julia doesn’t dare to ask what she’s supposed to be protecting him from, why she should take care of him.

  Since they don’t have anything else to do, Martin tells the girl they’ll go with her, and they walk along Hernani Kalea toward the old part of town. Martin, wanting to say something, makes the observation that it’s one of the most expensive bits of land in the world per square foot, not realizing that the comment might make him come off as petulant given that they’ve just left his parents’ house. Then he talks about the senselessness of building more parking lots downtown and how good taste and quality suffer every time the city council undertakes a project. It’s very dull stuff, especially for anyone who’s already heard it dozens of times before. They follow Lynn, since it’s she they’re accompanying, but Julia soon realizes that she isn’t walking in any particular direction, and the second time they reach the boulevard, she decides to say that they have to go, because it seems obvious to her that Lynn doesn’t want to take them to where she has her meeting. Martin, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to realize there’s a problem, he repeats that they aren’t in a hurry, and finally, Julia says that they are, in a big hurry, in fact, and she holds onto his arm and drags him away. She wishes Lynn good luck.

  Martin says that he didn’t realize the girl didn’t want them to see who she was meeting, but Julia doesn’t know whether to believe him. They go back home in silence. Sometimes she likes the train’s rhythmic clatter, it helps her to think. She thinks that she’d like to be in another train, one going somewhere a long way away. She overhears stupid remarks from the people chatting around them. Talking for the sake of it. She asks Martin why his mother always says that he has to take care of himself if he doesn’t want to catch his father’s illness. She’s not worried about it, his father’s disease is clearly degenerative and connected with old age, but she doesn’t understand why she says he started earlier. They’ve talked about it before, and his conclusion is always the same: “Just my mother’s strange ideas.” She also often mentions a fever he had before adolescence, a long delirium. One morning, his bed was soaking and they found him almost in a coma, and he stayed like that for several days before coming round again. Nobody knew what diagnosis to give. His mother normally gives evasive answers if pressed for details. She says the only thing she knows is that the same thing happened to her husband, a soaking bed and a delirium that lasted almost a week, the only difference was that he was much older when it happened to him. Sometimes Julia thinks that Martin’s mother knows more than she lets on. “You always think that, but it’s all just strange ideas my mother has,” Martin says. He doesn’t want to talk. In fact, the train isn’t the best place to talk, above all because when the subject isn’t to his liking, he tends to raise his voice.

  After getting off the train, they go up the slope and stop by the iron gate, as if they were saying goodbye. Martin says, “Who do you think she’s going to have dinner with?” Julia had been going to stay the night with him, because there’s no one at her house, but now she decides not to. She just shrugs her shoulders. She doesn’t think the girl said anything about having dinner. He says, “It has to be someone we know, and someone married, that’s why she wants to hide him.” What does it matter to him, she suddenly replies, more tired than bored. After that, Martin makes no effort to convince her to stay, and without bothering to come up with an excuse, she says she’s going to her place.

  La c�
�rémonie des adieux:

  Page 27: “Contre le socialisme centralisateur et abstrait, Sartre prônait ‘un autre socialisme, décentralisateur et concret: telle est l’universalité singulière des Basques, que l’E.T.A. oppose justement au centralisme abstrait des oppresseurs.’”—In opposition to centralizing, abstract socialism, Sartre favors “another type of socialism, decentralizing and specific: such is the singular universality of the Basques, which ETA sets in contrast to the abstract centralism of its oppressors.”

  Page 52: “Il faut être modeste quand on est vieux.”—You have to be modest when you’re old. Yes, imagining Sartre answering that, with his pant leg soaked through as Beauvoir asks him how he’s doing, gives her a better, more likeable image of him.

  She wonders if Simone took her shoes off when she lay down beside Sartre’s corpse.

  12

  The port is still one of the nicest places in Donostia, even though Abaitua thinks it’s lost all its personality. Fishing has almost completely disappeared as a way of life. He knew the dock at the foot of Mount Urgull when it would fill up with ships, especially during anchovy season. It smelled of salt water under the arches and of tar and burlap on the docks. Anchovies, which are now about to become extinct, would be piled up everywhere, waiting to be taken away to fertilizer plants. During the tuna season, on the other hand, the smell was like marmitako, because the fishermen would gather around their pots on their boat sterns and eat the potato and tuna stew right there. The sardine sellers with their hair up in buns, dressed entirely in black, wearing earrings and necklaces, standing up straight—he remembers their arrogant way of walking was brought out even more by their wearing clogs. They used to mix Basque with Spanish, and they looked like gypsies from Andalusia. While they waited for the boats to come in, they would play cards on top of great overturned barrels, and they were continually fighting, accusing each other of cheating. Their swear words and curses were terrifying, and their shamelessness often frightened the big young men from Orio and Getaria who, barefoot, unloaded the water-laden anchovy baskets. He knew the coastal fishing docks at another time, when coal and wood were unloaded from boats and Rezola cement was loaded back on.