She’s curious to know how Martin would react if she asked him if he’s had any more tests done. She’s absolutely sure he would never deduce from her interest that she knows anything about the man in front of the mirror, but the very idea of asking him makes her queasy. But she knows she’s going to end up asking him, and so finally she does.
She asks in a neutral voice, “Have you had any tests done recently?”
Perhaps it came out too loud. He turns toward her quickly, and the look in his blue eyes is enough to know that he’s astonished.
“Why do you ask?”
She has her answer ready.
“Cholesterol. You’ve been eating a lot of cheese lately.”
When she goes out to remove the supermarket bag, the cats come up and greet her.
14
Abaitua is already dressed when Pilar sticks her head in and says hello. She spent the night in Otzeta, she’s come by to pick up some documents, and after taking a shower, she’ll go back there. “Dying’s a mess.” She doesn’t seem to be very moved by her father’s death, she speaks about his final days in a neutral tone. Although she has been expecting it, it’s true. She said the old man had oesophageal cancer long before anyone else realized, even Orl. She repeated that she has a good clinical eye when he, Abaitua, said that the old man not eating much and being weak wasn’t important, it was just a passing depression.
She gets undressed in front of him. The new bathroom isn’t working properly, the renovators did something wrong, and so she’s back to using his. Her breasts are quite a lot larger than when she was young, and rather saggy. Abaitua leaves the bathroom and walks off to the living room. He doesn’t like being in such an intimate situation with her, he can’t stand being dressed while she’s naked, he doesn’t know exactly why. But it’s clear Pilar doesn’t care about that; she comes into the living room soon afterward, rubbing lotion onto her shoulders and her back with enviable agility, and gives him more details about the old man’s death. She says he died in her arms, peacefully.
Even though Pilar says there’s no need for him to cancel any of his operations, he just has to make it to Otzeta in time for the funeral, by the time he reaches the hospital, he sees clearly that he should have gone with her. So he decides to only do the first operation of the day—that way at least he’ll be able to get there before lunch.
He bumps into Lynn and Harri Gabilondo on his way out. The latter’s heard about his father-in-law. She gives him her condolences and asks after Pilar. Lynn, standing next to her, looks at him, as if wanting to know how affected he is by it all, he thinks. Sometimes she seems smaller, completely diminished, when she shrugs her shoulders. He thinks it happens to her when she’s worried. Her arms are tightly folded across her chest, her hands tucked under her arms—one of her typical postures—her right leg crossed behind her left ankle, her feet the wrong way around. She holds a hand out to him while Harri is telling him the latest department gossip, and, without touching him, she pulls it away again, quickly, with a gesture of regretting having gone too far, and she crosses her arms again like a punished child. It’s very obvious she’s told Harri they’ve slept together. He has nothing to hide, and he doesn’t mind. Women tell each other these things. Don’t they? He hasn’t told anybody about what’s happened with Lynn.
Dark pinewoods and a narrow valley. An old church, Knights Templar style. The inside of the church, where everyone is gathered, looks as if it’s falling down, some of the oval-based columns are completely crooked. The precarious condition of the building shows they have little respect for the past. As Pilar straightens his tie, she asks him, with a look, to be patient with the people coming up to them to give their condolences. He thinks she looks quite fragile now, and she has that air of sweetness she sometimes has. Of those who approach them, at least three people say that it was thanks to the old man that nobody in Otzeta died during the war. They say he didn’t care if they were on Franco’s side or Reds’, their lives had to be respected because they were locals, and he helped everybody as far as he could.
Remember your servant, oh Lord. The priest’s hiking boots and pants are visible underneath his surplice, and it looks as if his hunting dogs must be ready and waiting for him for when the service finishes. He tells them he’s in charge of four parishes.
It’s a bilingual mass, as Pilar’s mother requested, and Abaitua finds it strange hearing Spanish in church, he can’t get used to it. Ugly hymns, bland words, and vulgar music. Basque, on the other hand, sounds as appropriate as Latin. Those dies iraes. That austere, tragic solemnity; large black and golden candles; the smell of incense; deep voices; full-sounding words. Pompa mortis. He thinks the religious ceremony is becoming redundant, losing its meaning, and that no lay equivalent has been found for it yet.
When the priest, in his short homily, says that they haven’t come together for a social gathering but rather to declare their renewed faith, he has to stop himself from walking out. Our brother Luis. The priest, too, mentions how the old man never sought vengeance, in spite of having been on the winning side.
Abaitua remembers some other church services. The most solemn of them, no doubt about it, was Fernando Aire Xalbador’s funeral in Donostia’s Good Shepherd Cathedral in 1976. A year after Franco died. The entire Orfeón Donostiarra choral society sang at it, and there were enough people in attendance to fill the cathedral twice over. He’s convinced that nobody, however important they might be, could ever again bring together such a varied group of people in terms of origins and attitudes. And that’s because the Basque language is no longer something emotionally shared and treasured by all citizens of the Basque Country.
And he often remembers another funeral, one he himself didn’t go to. That, too, had been held at the Good Shepherd Cathedral. It was for two people who’d been killed by ETA: a high-ranking soldier, and his driver, a young man who’d been posted to his detail as part of his military service. Abaitua doesn’t remember the date. While they were going somewhere in the now-deceased officer’s car, two men on a motorcycle drew up even with them, and the one sitting on the back stuck a bomb on the roof. The driver had time to break, but not to get out of the car. It could have been a bloodbath, right there in the center of Donostia, but in the end only the soldier and the young man died, although some others were wounded.
The funeral was for both of them, and Abaitua’s mother attended it—the driver’s father was a friend of hers. She often talks about it, because she was very moved by it, she says. She says the coffins were placed side by side in front of the altar, with Spanish flags laid over them. That was how the army organized it, and the family didn’t dare to ask them to do it any differently. But according to Abaitua’s mother, the young man’s father wasn’t able to stand seeing a Spanish flag on top of his son’s coffin, and gathering all his courage, he asked the officer presiding over the funeral with him—Abaitua’s mother doesn’t know what rank he was—to take it off, and he did. She mimes the officer folding up the flag with great delicacy each time Abaitua asks her to tell him the story.
He also remembers the day of Teresa Hoyos’s father’s funeral. A clear, sunny winter’s day. He wanted to go, but the neighborhood church was full up. There were army officers with thin moustaches and sunglasses who couldn’t get in, and he felt out of place.
He doesn’t want to think about how bad Teresa Hoyos must have felt.
Offer each other a sign of peace. He sees some old Franco supporters who his father-in-law always avoided during his final years. One of those guys on that one May Day, he doesn’t remember the exact year, who stuck the Spanish colors in his buttonhole and started beating up the handful of demonstrators that had gathered and then fled in fear. (Jesús Revilla was one of them—a tall bald man who used to walk around the city streets with an arrogant expression on his face and without anyone ever daring to call him a fascist.)
Jaime Zabaleta is there, too; he has t
o have bodyguards for much lesser reasons. He tells Pilar that her father was a gentleman, and when he greets Abaitua, he looks as if he’s amused by something. He thinks it’s because the last time he saw him he was with Lynn down at the port.
The cemetery is next to the church and is very small. Old iron crosses, most of the graves without any sort of slab on top of them, only piled-up earth, and new marble gravestones with lauburus—Basque crosses—on them. The only thing that looks like a mausoleum—with a gray stone angel, its wings folded down and a finger on its lips asking for silence—belongs to the Goytisolos. Pilar puts a bunch of wild flowers she picked nearby on it. Just as the old man wanted it—no pomp and circumstance. She turns around and hugs Abaitua. He’s moved to feel Pilar’s body shaking against his. Like the only other time he’s ever seen her crying from grief, that time she asked him not to leave her, without any inhibitions, not stifling her cries. Like a child.
It’s late when he gets in the car to go back home, because his mother-in-law invited the family and close friends to the Lasa restaurant in Bergara. It’s what the deceased would have wanted. He loved that restaurant. A classic, as he always used to say, in spite of not getting all the media coverage some other places have. His brother- and sister-in-law compete to name the places where they’ve had their best meals, praising the dishes as works of art and bragging about their connections to the famous chefs.
A sociological reflection. He remembers the Livy quote Kepa recited to him the first time they ate at Argi Eder: “The cook whom the ancients regarded and treated as the lowest menial was rising in value, and, what had been a servile office came to be looked upon as a fine art.” They don’t talk about the old man, but when somebody mentions the future of the clinic, there’s a quarrel. Pilar seems to have recovered. In any case, she eats heartily. Everyone’s eating heartily except for Loiola, who looks gloomily at his plate without touching it, as if he were reproaching them for behaving as if nothing’s happened, and Abaitua, to set himself apart from the other, declines to order dessert, in solidarity with his son.
He finds the drive back, following Pilar in her car, difficult—she drives faster and better than he does—and it bothers him that Loiola, who’s sitting in the passenger seat and can’t take the wheel because he left his licence at home, can see that, even though he’s the first one to laugh at himself about his driving and doesn’t mind that he’s seldom the driver when they go anywhere as a couple, joking that it just goes to show he’s no sexist.
He has a hard time keeping up with Pilar as far as Elgoibar, and from there on, he lets her go on ahead. The boy, understandingly, says it’s a very bad road and that it’s crazy to go more than sixty on it.
He asks his father questions about the old man, and he tries to paint the same agreeable picture Pilar does. He was a good doctor, he loved his profession, and he was ahead of his time. Having been on Franco’s side during the war didn’t mean he was a fascist. He never accepted any of the many positions he was offered during the dictatorship. He was a traditionalist, and was definitely attached to the Basque Country. He doesn’t tell him that his grandfather was more of a racist than his other grandfather, who was a nationalist, but he does tell him that he believed the objective of the Basques should not be to separate from Spain but rather to dominate Spain, through hard work and wealth, and that he consequently thought that Basque nationalism was a mistake.
And of course, he said what was always said about him: when Franco’s troops entered Otzeta, they didn’t kill anybody.
And if he loved his community and traditions so much, why didn’t he pass the Basque language onto his children?
It’s a question the boy has asked a thousand times since he started to think for himself. It’s probably one of the questions Pilar feels most uncomfortable about, and she tries to answer it by comparing her father with Unamuno. They both loved Basque but thought it was an obstacle in terms of cultural development and that it had no future. And that’s more or less what he says. But why does his son insist on asking the same question again and again?
It’s a difficult question, and he finds it hard to be sincere about it. He compares Basque with archaeological finds that force engineers to stop digging tunnels or change the course of roads—a respectable relic, but one that causes problems. He isn’t optimistic about the costly, hard-won initiatives undertaken by the education system and the public administration; the language not having expanded enough, the issue of Basque has become a disagreeable conflict for many people, and even many of those who know the language don’t use it. For children it’s a language to use at school, one they leave behind as soon as they step out of the classroom. (A friend’s child once expressed his surprise at being addressed in Basque outside of his language immersion school, “Hey, we’re not in the ikastola any more!”) It seems it’s going to be difficult to obtain a critical mass of speakers who are able to use the language with ease, but if imposing its use isn’t the answer, it doesn’t look likely that retreating to winter quarters and using Basque only in intimate circles or exclusively for folklore and patriotic acts will win over the non-Basque speakers, either.
What, then?
Languages are functional tools. It’s often said that languages don’t die because people aren’t learning them but because those who do know them aren’t using them, but that’s like saying that life doesn’t stop as long as there are signs of brain activity. Everything is born and dies. Apparently there are five thousand languages in the world, and every year, twenty-five of them die, but not a single person goes silent because of that. A reality that is much easier to accept for people whose mother tongue is an imperial language.
Not while I’m alive.
After passing the town of Zarautz, they ride along in silence.
When they pull up outside the building door, Pilar’s there waiting for them next to her car. Her mother hasn’t gotten out. She tells them she’s going to spend the night at her place, she’s just coming in to get some sleeping pills. She doesn’t take them often. She gives him a fleeting kiss, just long enough to feel that her cheeks are cold, which gives the impression that she’s been in contact with death. Loiola says he’ll walk back to the apartment on Urbieta Kalea, where he used to have his private practice, but he doesn’t move, and Abaitua gets nervous; he’d like to be left alone, and at the same time, wanting that—wanting his son to go—makes him feel guilty. Because he thinks the boy feels sorry to leave him alone. He decides to say that he’s very tired and has to operate the next morning. He wouldn’t want somebody to lose their ovaries because he isn’t fully awake.
Another missed opportunity to talk about security, the need to take some basic precautions, but whenever he actually has him there with him, he doesn’t think it’s the right moment—why frighten him. He pats his back in farewell. He doesn’t remember when they stopped kissing each other goodbye. Whenever it was, he didn’t realize it was going to be the last one when he gave it to him. It’s the same with everything. He doesn’t know why he feels sorry for him when he goes. Sorry for his sorrow, because he knows his parents don’t get along, and that makes him sad.
There’s a travel bag of Pilar’s inside the door to the apartment. He picks it up and leaves it on a chair. He’s never opened a bag of Pilar’s, not even back when he thought she had secrets to keep from him. The smell of her perfume in the bathroom. It’s sweet but not too sweet, and also refreshing; he loves that smell, which is her body’s smell, even though he’s never told her. Lynn’s has a touch of bitterness to it that reminds him of ripe grass. He isn’t tired, and he sits down in the half-light. But not for long. He sees the white of the breakers through the window, and the orange dots of the streetlights on the promenade.
He would have liked to have driven back via Martutene, just to see if her lights were on. He even thinks about going over there and spending some time standing in front of her house, but he knows that if he did that
, he wouldn’t be able to resist calling on her.
He wakes up with the idea that he’s going to see Lynn, and that makes him jump out of bed, the cheerful sunlight streaming in through the window, because he forgot to lower the blinds the night before, that being one of the tasks Pilar still takes care of. But then, later, after just a quarter of an hour, while he’s making sure the toast doesn’t get burned, he promises himself he won’t see her, which will make it clear that their meetings are no more than occasional and imply neither obligation nor commitment.
He enjoys being alone in the bathroom.
He chooses some pointed black shoes he’s had for years now. When he bought them, they told him they were made of kangaroo skin, and they have large silver buckles on the sides. Pilar usually tells him they look like cardinal’s shoes and he should throw them out. Lynn, on the other hand, has told him they’re very elegant. He remembers that moment. When she said “your shoes are very elegant,” he uncrossed his legs and moved reflexively to pull his socks up, few things embarrassing him more than showing his calves, the soft white skin he has there, hairless, a part of his body he’s particularly unhappy about because it’s already showing signs of his age. He thought that Lynn noticed his embarrassed gesture, and feeling ridiculous, he started explaining to her—Frisch says that when he likes a woman, he starts talking like an idiot—about the alterations that men’s and women’s bodies undergo as they grow older, making them more like each other once again, as they were in childhood. Men’s breasts get bigger and women’s smaller; women get more body hair and men’s falls out; women’s voices get deeper and men’s shriller. Lynn told him that both old and young men lose the hair on their ankles because of socks rubbing against them all the time. He remembered, however, that when he and Pilar once spoke about that exact same thing, Pilar pointed out to him that women’s tights don’t do the same thing, at least not in her case, and somebody should research whether it could be a system for permanent hair removal, perhaps they could patent it. Abaitua replied that it had never occurred to him to think that she had any problem with body hair; the truth was that until recently, he added, and perhaps rather sarcastically, he had always taken her to be angelical, always had that idea of her. And then Pilar, in an unforgettable moment, looked him in the eyes and said, “That’s the problem, you’ve always thought of me as an angel.” She wasn’t joking. He thought it was an enigmatic answer, and without knowing why, he was convinced it was connected with something profound in their relationship, and although he dropped the subject, for fear of finding out more, he kept thinking about it and was worried it might have to do with her sexual impulses. Once, later on, taking advantage of a period of harmony in their relationship, he dared to bring up the conversation again and asked her what she’d meant when she said that his thinking of her as an angel was a problem, but it turned out she didn’t remember what she’d said. He thought she didn’t say that with much conviction. He didn’t believe her, and he imagined that Pilar thought—just as she had when he’d given her a wedding ring twenty years or more after getting married—that the time for that was past.
Martutene Page 55
