Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  She’s sitting back on the sofa with her legs in the lotus position. She’s so white that in the half-light, there’s a bluish tone to her skin. In a typical gesture of hers, she raises her chin, shakes her hair backward, and then puts her hands back on her knees. Matisse’s drawings. The scarcely sketched figure of a woman. Spirals of hair, fine lines showing strong hips, the zigzag of hands crossed over her knees and short curls between her legs. He’d like to draw her at that precise instant. In fact, he’s sure that if he had a pencil and paper, and the nerve to say that he wanted to draw her, he could do a good portrait of her.

  She moves her thin-fingered hands away from her knees and, at the same time, straightens up. She leans toward him. She has a serious expression on her face now, a decisive look that makes him uneasy. An unarmed man. Crazy thoughts: if he were to draw her, her chest would be the easiest part. He catches her smell once more and feels her cool skin as she snuggles up to him. She takes his hands for him to hold her. “Just hold me, for now.”

  He still finds it amazing to be next to her naked body, naked himself, too, talking about all sorts of things, as if they were in a bar. “Do you know what?”

  Now the doctor knows why she’s gone serious all of a sudden. She wants to talk about the hospital. She finds it surprising that while most of the professional people in the department—doctors, nurses, and auxiliary staff—do their work well, a few others are allowed to avoid working, some of them actually doing their jobs very badly. She can’t understand how that situation is so calmly accepted. She speaks gently and softly, as if afraid he might be offended by what she’s saying.

  She says that Arrese lets doctors do whatever they want so that he doesn’t have to deal with them. Whenever anybody brings him a problem, he normally starts shouting like a madman, particularly at young nurses. Just yesterday, he drove a nurse to tears.

  Everyone knows that the X-ray technician feels people up.

  She talks about doctors who insist on showing sonogram footage to poor parents who are in danger of losing the child. Comments inappropriate in such a bleak situation, like “look, see his little hand, he’s waving at us.”

  About midwives who can’t get Kristeller’s method out of their heads. About the habit of sitting on women who are about to give birth in order to “help them along,” the foul language used to encourage them to push—”Push like you’re trying to shit,” and so on.

  But, then, she can’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know.

  Even so, as he listens to Lynn, he finds it amazing that pointless suffering and injustice take place without anybody complaining about them, as if it were just part of everyday life. It’s clear there’s an underlying criticism in her words and that she thinks he should do something about these types of behaviour.

  But what could he actually do?

  Déjà dit. He’s often told her that he made a decision long ago to be as honest and effective as possible in his work and to concern himself only with his own affairs, without looking too much around him, in order not to waste his energy and get burned out. When he was head of the department, he found out that it was very difficult to change even the smallest things without getting into all sorts of difficulties. There were too many vested interests for it to be possible to influence things with mere good will. In order to change anything in an institution such as a hospital, everything would have to be rearranged from top to bottom, and to do that, political will and a mature, informed society were needed. That’s why he gave up being the department head, he was tired of wasting his time listening to complaints he didn’t know how to respond to. He’s embarrassed to have to use such arguments to excuse himself, but he doesn’t see any other way out of it, passing his pure cowardice off as elegant, disinterested skepticism.

  What would Lynn say if she knew the real reason that had prevented him from confronting Arrese? If he told her what was behind his inability to act? He knows that he would find it liberating to shed his deceit, he’d like to do it, but the mere thought of it terrifies him. As usual, he’s as proud as he is cowardly. So he says what he always says—he doesn’t want problems, he just wants to cure his patients—when Lynn insists softly that any alternative would be better than Arrese. He repeats that he doesn’t want problems and says he’d be grateful if she could forget about the hospital in their free time. He can’t control his anger. The poor girl’s seeing his irritability once more, and she stretches her lips out in a weak smile that’s a request for peace and says that she knows he does all he can.

  It isn’t the first time he’s seen her rubbing her temples. When he asks if she’s all right, she admits she has a slight headache and smiles to play it down. She’s having trouble with her sight, and that’s probably what’s behind it. She has an appointment with the ophthalmologist. She’s also got premenstrual pains, the ones some male doctors don’t believe exist but many women obstinately continue to have, she says humorously. Abaitua protests that she’s taking what he said out of context, even though he knows she’s not being serious. He doesn’t deny the existence of premenstrual problems, what he says is that because of the influence of drug companies, more and more women are being led to believe that their normal physiological discomforts are symptoms of some illness or other. They’ve already talked about it, he thinks it was in Bordeaux. As Kepa usually says, instead of inventing new medicines, the laboratories look for illnesses that the old medicines can be used on, look for new uses for their old products. If possible, chronic illnesses that many people suffer from, in order to maximize their profit intake. Fluoxetine, known commercially as Prozac, has been found useful, among other things, for treating PMS, which is something that, depending on the statistics you look at, between thirty and eighty percent of fertile women suffer from. The problem is that before long, most women will be taking antidepressants to treat the emotional changes associated with the onset or conclusion of their menstruation cycles and, in most cases, it won’t be any use to them. But he doesn’t deny the fact that there are serious cases. He’s glad the subject has come up, because it gives him the chance to say that he thinks taking antidepressants doesn’t make sense, especially tricylicals, if only because they cause galactorrhea. But she doesn’t let him go on. She takes ahold of both his hands and shakes them to get him to keep quiet and pay attention to her, frowning to pretend to be angry. Does he think she’s sick? she asks, after moving his hands around again as one might to a child in order to get an answer out of them. There are little pieces of dry skin on her lips. He says yes. She frowns again, her forehead damp. “Benetan? Really?” She says the word in Basque as often as she does in English. And she always puts the accent on the first syllable, instead of on the second or last. He finds it funny. “Really, yes.” “So you do believe me, don’t you?” She says, in a loud voice, which even cracks a little, that she has a serious illness for which there is no cure. “Mad about you.” She goes on shaking his hands after each thing she says to him. “Maite zaitudalako. Because I love you.” She says she has an incurable illness. He thinks she’s being serious and tries to protect himself—could she please stop saying silly things and tell him what illness she has? Does she have a temperature? Taking his hands out of hers, he puts one on her forehead and takes her pulse with the other, but Lynn stops him and pretends to get angry. She absolutely forbids him to treat her like a patient. She holds his waist between her legs and pretends to punch his chest. If she needed a doctor, she says, she’d definitely go to Doctor Arrese. She wants Abaitua for other things. He feels the murmur of her voice warmly tickling his ear and asks her not to be mean, it’s his turn to pretend. He’s old. Doesn’t she realize she could give him a heart attack? What would happen if death took him on this sofa, or while he was going down the spiral staircase in the dark? Has she thought about that? She answers completely seriously that she has. She has thought about that eventuality. He takes one of her hands and caresses it. He thinks she’s telling the
truth, that she has thought about his death.

  They’re both lying lengthwise on the sofa, he’s on the inside with one hand lifted upward to pet the cat, watching the shadows from the tree on the ceiling. She’s on the outside edge of the sofa, on her side, her arms crossed. She says that since he’s older, the normal outcome would be for him to die first. He knows that sometimes she says what she really thinks as if it were a joke. She asks him some unexpected questions, which he answers with single words, without joining in her game, resignedly saying she’s right.

  “Tell me.” Doesn’t he think it would be normal for him to die before her?

  She says he can’t expect her to jump onto his funeral pyre like some Indian widow. She asks if he understands that. She’ll look after him with love, and when he goes—Abaitua really hates that euphemism, when you go—since she’ll still be quite young, she’ll remake her life. It won’t be the same, but she’ll be all right. He doesn’t have to worry about her at all. “Tell me.” Is he worried about dying first? He should tell her. Touching his ribs with her fingers and nibbling at his neck, she says that although she’s not sure, she thinks he’s going to live for a long time and that if she outlives him, she’ll be a little old lady by then.

  He asks her to stop saying silly things.

  “Tell me.” How can doctors be incapable of seeing what’s right in front of them?

  Sometimes he gets furious when people lump all doctors together, and politicians, too. As if sociologists or architects were any better. But he’d rather talk about that than love. One example of doctors’ inability to see things is the fact that none of them ever paid any attention to the problem of pregnancies lasting more than forty-two weeks until Clifford described the postmaturity syndrome in 1954. And, he says, that’s despite the fact that millions and millions of women since the Holocene had been insisting that they’d given birth to children after more than ten months of pregnancy, children who were obviously different—wrinkled, long-nailed, and undernourished as a result of having been linked too long to a placenta that had become no more than a dry sponge. But still nobody paid attention to the evidence. It was the women, the poor fools, they just didn’t know how to keep track of their missed periods.

  “Just one question.” Even when he’s talking about medicine, she often doesn’t know to what extent to believe him. “Please, don’t laugh.” She asks him to take her seriously. When they were first set up, Christian hospitals’ main objective was not to make people healthy again but rather to give caregivers the opportunity to save patients’ souls with their charitable work. Taking into account the fact that even after a long process of evolution, getting patients healthy again and lengthening their lives was still only a secondary objective, she has a question: What is their main objective nowadays?

  This time he’s the one who says really. Even though all doctors are pigs, blind, and incapable, the most sensible thing for a sick person to do is still to go to the doctor’s, and he asks her to promise to go to one as soon as possible to find out what’s behind her mysterious problems. He holds her wrists to emphasize what he’s asking her to do. She should go to any doctor except for Arrese, and she, trying to break free, says she’s crazy but not crazy enough to put herself in the hands of the sort of faux gynecologists they have at the hospital.

  He sits up and takes her hands again to repeat his request and says he would even agree to her going to Arrese if there were no alternative. “Surgical midwives.” She sits on him, a leg to either side of him, trying to keep him from moving, as she recites the stream of Spanish epithets Kepa taught her, and her difficulty pronouncing them makes them even more comical. “Vendimiadores de vientres, pasteleros de úteros, segadores de monstruos, hurones de pocilgas humanas, ladrones de la herramienta de parir. . .” she says—harvesters of abdomens, pastry-makes of uteri, reapers of monsters, ferrets of human pigsties, thieves of birthing instruments. He tries to stop her from moving, which takes some effort. Holding her tight in his arms, rolling around on the carpet, he says she should go see a psychiatrist about her gerontophilia—he knows she doesn’t like that joke, but he comes out with it anyway—and her premenstrual irritability, anxiety, and other emotional disturbances, which often have psychiatric origins.

  Lynn says, “The girl who went mad with love.” At this stage, no psychiatrist could possibly cure her of her madness. “Too late? Is it ‘berandu’?”

  Abaitua nods.

  But does he mean yes that’s how you say it, or yes it is too late?

  Abaitua shields himself in silence, knowing that a cycle of declarations of love will follow. Lynn waits a long time for him to say something. It seems like a long time to him, at least. He sees bits of broken skin on her thick lips, and then, looking as if she can’t take any more, she asks him, regretfully, if he believes her when she says she loves him. She says she isn’t asking him to say he loves her, she just wants him to believe her when she tells him she’s in love with him. He patiently says he does. How could he not believe her when she’s told him so many times? So he says yes, he does, but without adding that he loves her too, even though that’s what she really wants to hear, even though, in fact, he finds it hard not to say it; “Neither of them has ever said I love you.” That’s what Frisch says at the end of Montauk, pleased they’ve never declared their love for each other. So why has this Lynn said it to him in three different languages? Why do things always get so complicated for him? The silence lasts a long time, but he isn’t going to be the one to break it. The fridge motor suddenly starts up and makes a lot of noise. It sounds old. Lynn asks him what he’s thinking about. It isn’t a question asked out of desperation, it seems like a request to break the silence, and he says the first thing that comes to mind. When he was talking about the postmaturity births that had gone unnoticed until Clifford opened his eyes to them, he remembered that Kepa once told him that Eskimo dogs can put off giving birth for up to two weeks if the weather conditions are especially adverse.

  Really? She falls back against the sofa with her eyes closed and one hand on her forehead, as if she were fainting. She says she can’t believe he was thinking about that. She sits up again and holds both of his hands. “You don’t want me to say I love you.”

  He now works up the courage to tell her no. And he’s decided to tell her why he doesn’t like it if she asks him. Because he feels obliged to tell her he loves her, too, and he can’t. He has trouble holding Lynn’s clear, serious stare. She doesn’t ask him anything more. She sighs and lovingly strokes his hand. She can’t promise she’ll manage to do it, but she’ll try to repress her urge to tell him how much she loves him.

  A beer? The question makes his heart beat a little faster. A conditioned reflex. He wonders whether she realizes that. She’s sitting on folded legs—he sometimes thinks she’s made of rubber—and she rises to her knees, pushing herself up with her hands. A beer?

  He hears her moving around in the kitchen, and there are increasingly loud voices coming from the floor below. He knows they’re women’s voices but can’t make out whose they are. Lynn could. Now she’s standing in the middle of the living room holding two long glasses with bits of lemon in them and two Franziskaner beers, all on a tray, and she’s listening carefully. That’s Julia, that’s Martin’s sister. She says Harri’s there, too. She’s able to identify their voices.

  She pours the beer as Kepa taught her, tilting the glass a lot. After pouring a little, she livens up what’s left in the bottle by rubbing it between her hands and then adds it slowly to the glass. He watches her impatiently, surprised that his tired body replies so obediently to that conditioned reflex.

  Lynn sits on the floor with her back against the sofa, her hands resting on the floor to either side of her. Her head is leaning slightly to one side. Her mouth is half open in an expression of tiredness. “You drive me crazy,” she murmurs, as if she really has lost her mind, and Abaitua covers her mouth to stop her
from talking.

  Don’t be silly.

  She asks him to let her say for the last time, whispering in his ear so that nobody else will hear, that she loves him.

  He lets her put his hand on her vulva, and he feels its dampness. She holds him there, whispering in his ear that just touching her there drives her wild. “Zer egiten duzu niri?” she says, attempting to wonder aloud what it is that he does to her but getting the grammar wrong. He’d like to escape from the situation, because he doesn’t like exaggerations—he’s afraid they might be real. He isn’t sure. He corrects her Basque, and she makes a gesture of impatience in reply. She opens her eyes. He sees sorrow and disappointment in them. She doesn’t know what language to use to make him believe that his mere touch is enough for her to lose her mind. She holds tightly to his arm, shaking as she repeats, correctly now, “Zer egiten didazu?” with insistent groans, her voice more and more broken, and he feels his hand has exceptional powers. Or he feels that for a moment, at least.

  He lies down. He feels the cool wood on his back and intense pleasure all over his body. He’s tired. She’s still sitting with her back against the sofa, her head leaning toward her right shoulder. He sees her lifting her left hand to her opposite breast, holding it in her palm and squeezing her nipple, as she usually does, between her thumb and forefinger. He tells her not to, she doesn’t have to.

  It’s a moment in which it seems the pleasure is only for her. He moves away from her, fascinated by the scale of her pleasure—a pleasure in no way connected to him, something he has nothing to do with, is not familiar with—and a little alarmed. He sees her stretch out in an arc, her arm going over her head and holding onto the bottom of the sofa, her eyes roll up into her head; he thinks she’s about to start trembling.