Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Abaitua starts to become aware of the sounds around them once more, identifying them one by one, regaining his perception of them as if he were coming out of a deep, silent pit. He wonders if he himself has ever felt as much pleasure, and whether he’s ever wondered about such a thing before. He isn’t sure. He isn’t sure whether he’s gone through life convinced that he’s been enjoying his sexuality to its fullest or whether, as in other areas, he’s had doubts about whether he’s explored all the possibilities or remained satisfied with just enough. It’s been enough, he thinks, at least he’s never felt frustrated about not being able to go further in that respect. It’s true he doesn’t have anything to compare his experience with, since sex isn’t something people around him talk about. Only jokes and sarcastic comments about the failings of age and spousal shortcomings. He remembers a dinner party with his best friends at university. They all had dates except for Juan Aguilar, who was divorced for the second time. He’d started seeing a Cuban woman thirty years younger than himself and was talking about that with the enthusiasm he always showed for any new relationship. And then he said something that surprised them all: he’d learned how to kiss from her. He realized that the moments of contact between lips and tongues that he had experienced with all his girlfriends, fiancées, and wives up until then weren’t real kisses. They were nothing like the exciting kisses he shared with this young Cuban woman.

  As well as being the only divorcé in the group, Aguilar is also the life and soul of every party, for both the men and the women. They all really enjoy hearing about the trips he’s made around the world and the adventures he’s had since recovering from his depression after splitting up with his second wife. He says he thinks the men envy him, and he’s right to an extent. He’s small and chubby, but he’s lively and dances a lot; he’s romantic and prone to falling in love, one of those men women find attractive. He doesn’t bring his lovers to the group dinners, and that makes it easier for him to talk openly about sex.

  Talking about his thirty-years-younger Cuban friend, he said he regretted having lived more than half his life without knowing what real kissing is, taking for granted that it was the same for the rest of them. There were some nervous giggles. They could have told him that they had nothing to learn from a young Cuban woman, but nobody said anything. Out of shame, and partly out of pity, too, because the fact that Aguilar’s love life was in its second or third youth made them feel a little sorry for him. Perhaps some people there had once had the same experience as him and had to keep quiet because their spouses were there. Perhaps some people also started to wonder whether they were missing out on something, something they’d have fewer and fewer chances to put right. On their way back home, Abaitua wanted to bring it up with Pilar. He said something to her, something about Aguilar being horny, and she said, “He’s a little naïve,” that’s all. Now he wonders if he understood what she meant. He thinks she meant that, like Aguilar, everyone realizes too late that they haven’t led a full sex life. But being more reserved that Aguilar, they don’t say anything about it. Pilar, too, knew what it was to kiss somebody much younger than herself. They didn’t talk any more after that, because he remembered Pilar sitting on the edge of the bed, her forearms resting on her legs and her head down, as if she were looking at her hands. He’d put a hand on her arm and asked the young man’s name. He didn’t want to think about it.

  Lynn is asleep. He can’t even hear her breathing.

  When he and Aguilar drove to Milan together, he hardly stopped talking about his first wife, all the way from Donostia. How much he missed her, how they used to “kiss each other like lovebirds” as soon as they woke up. Abaitua hasn’t forgotten how striking he found it that after having been married for several years, he was still so much in love, and he was even more surprised by his not being embarrassed to talk about it in such a corny way. He’s sure he said “like lovebirds.” He’d like to know if now that the Cuban pediatrician is history, too, Aguilar still remembers or misses those lovebird kisses.

  He thinks it was in Montauk that he read that the first time with a woman is always the first time. Whoever said it, it’s true, and in fact, the basis of promiscuity is probably rooted in that desire to have another first time.

  He regrets being so clumsy in some of the relationships he’s had with women—he’s even ashamed of a few particular memories—but he still feels affection for all the woman he has ever made love with. And so what is he worried about? His pleasure has very seldom, or perhaps never, been free of a feeling of guilt.

  A train. Some other trains must have gone by, too, without their hearing them. The wind is now blowing from the south and is much noisier because of that, it makes the noise from the rails last longer, as if the train were never going to completely disappear. Sometimes Lynn bets on which of them will guess what type of train is passing, and they run along the hallway to the balcony to check, him letting her go first so that she won’t see his back. He should get up and pee now, but he’s feeling too lazy and stays lying down. He tries not to use her bathroom.

  The reserved space under the streetlamps at the entrance of the clinic’s parking lot, where Pilar’s little car had been shortly before, is now empty. There are many lights on in the apartment buildings, most of them white kitchen lights. He realizes from this fact that it’s dinnertime; he’s got to get going. Lynn leans on his back with her arm around him.

  Frisch says he wants Lynn to be the last one. Abaitua knows that’s how it’s going to be for him, this Lynn will be the last one.

  The light traffic also means it’s late. Lynn is asleep now, her head on his shoulder, curled up against his ribs, giving off damp warmth and that intense, sweet smell of hers. She whistles slightly as she breathes out. He decides to take his arm out from under her, get dressed silently, and leave her there asleep. Before doing so, he’ll have to shoo the cat away, which is curled up on his pants and staring at him as if it wanted to know what he’s planning to do. He frees his arm very carefully and stretches out enough to be able to touch his pants with his fingertips, but Lynn sits up as if she were on a spring. Is he going?

  Doesn’t he want to stay and have some dinner? She can offer him some stuffed peppers from the shop over at the Culinary School. He’s tried those frozen peppers, stuffed with swordfish instead of cod and with a dubious cocktail sauce made with a lot of cream. He can’t, he has to go, and he doesn’t want to stay. He’s also decided to be merciless on matters like this, telling her his decisions without cushioning them, giving his diagnoses and prognoses the way the American school recommends—beating around the bush is never any help. She doesn’t discuss his decision. She doesn’t lift a finger to make him stay; she never does. Although when she stretches her lips out, almost like a smile, she looks very sad to him. “Bazoaz,” she says—you’re going. Pronouncing the z perfectly, and he follows the cat, which has jumped heavily off the chair and disappeared down the hallway. He tries to put his pants on as quickly as possible, because he doesn’t like her seeing him in underpants, either. When he goes back in, she’s wearing her green pajamas, the ones with little drawings on them that look like children’s pajamas and, inevitably, make her look like a little girl.

  He wouldn’t know what to say if she asked him why he had to go.

  As always, she leans against the wall and looks at him, petting the cat in her arms at the same time, and she helps him when he has trouble getting into the right-hand sleeve. Then she wants to brush his pants down, because she’s seen him trying to shake some hairs off them, but he doesn’t let her. He thinks it’s too attentive of her, and what’s more, he doesn’t want her to think the cat is a problem as far as he’s concerned, and even less so that he’s worried he might have to face up to Pilar’s scrutiny when he gets home. But she gives him a brush and insists he do it himself. He obeys her, and she points out where there are hairs.

  She’s barefoot. Her feet are small for her height, and he
r big toes lift up as she steps. She walks in front of him to the door and looks through the peephole to make sure there’s nobody there. She moves to one side to let him past, almost hiding herself between the wall and the door. The cat jumps from her arms and rubs itself against his pants and, after sniffing at his shoes, lies in front of him with its belly up, asking him to pet it. No, Max. She picks it up again. He says it’s Saturday tomorrow. A way of saying that they won’t be seeing each other at the hospital. He says vaguely that he’ll call her. And then an innocent kiss on each cheek.

  By now he’s used to the smell of the jasmine and the sound of the gravel. When he opens the iron gate, he realizes he doesn’t have a car and will have to call a taxi.

  It’s around ten or eleven at night. The taxi driver is listening to a sports program. He says Donostia’s Real Sociedad is doing badly and that he’s started to get bored of soccer. He doesn’t know whether the good moments are worth all the suffering. Abaitua says life’s like that, and the taxi driver looks at him in the mirror. He probably wants to know where somebody wearing a tie has come from at that time of night. Abaitua would have to tell him he’s been fooling around with a young woman for the last six hours. He feels at one with the night. The taxi driver says no when he asks him if he’s been getting a lot of business today—Donostia isn’t a lively place at night.

  He finds Pilar asleep in front of the television. Her laptop’s on the table and turned on, along with some files from the clinic and some books. She has one open on her lap. His first impulse is to wake her up, but then he leaves her there and goes to brush his teeth and get ready for bed.

  Techniques in Neurosurgery. When he gently takes the book from her hands, she opens her eyes and looks at him for a moment, confused, as if she didn’t recognize him. “You’re back,” she says, and then, “I fell asleep,” as if she had to excuse herself. The sides of her mouth have drooped over the last few months, since her father’s illness and death, and some of the vertical wrinkles around her mouth are deeper. Abaitua lets her scrutinize him, glad he’s put his pajamas on.

  He feels obliged to say that he’s bumped into Kepa, she knows what he’s like, and as soon as he says that, he thinks he might have told her that morning that Kepa’s in London. He doesn’t care. He’s used to sticking to lies even when there’s evidence to the contrary. But his wife’s wrinkled lips speak and tell him she’s made scorpionfish for dinner. He’s seen it, with thin potatoes and small peas in a green sauce with finely chopped parsley, all inside a clay cooking pot. In order to avoid the risk, distant though it is, of her sitting down with him as she used to do when he would come home late and asking him how his day went while he eats, he prefers to say that it’s a pity but he’s already had something to eat. What’s more, not having dinner is a way of punishing himself.

  He says he’s dead tired, as a way of getting ready to make his escape.

  Then his wife puts on her reading glasses. They look good on her, they don’t make her look older, which is what she thinks; they make her look like an active, interesting woman. She says she’s half asleep, too, but she has to study. In spite of what she says, she suddenly looks wide awake. She tells him she operated on a guy called Chiari, who was on the waiting list, without telling her brother-in-law, even though that’ll lead to a quarrel. She’s pleased with the work she’s done and determined to keep the clinic going. For the first time in a long while, she talks to him until she sees that he’s bored, or tired, and then she tells him he’d better go to bed. With no resentment.

  He’s no longer tired.

  He reads in Montauk: Il est encore surpris de connaître son corps, son corps à elle. Il ne s’y attendait pas. Si Lynn ne lui signifiait pas de temps en temps qu’elle aussi se rappelle cette nuit, les mains de l’homme n’oseraient pas saisir la tête de la femme. He prefers to turn the light off, since he’s told Pilar he’s dead tired.

  He remembers Lynn as he struggles to take his pants off—“you’re wearing armor,” she’d said.

  He remembers Ayllón. The Galician colony in Donostia’s Trintxerpe neighborhood was the last stronghold of home birthing in Gipuzkoa, and Ayllón was the doctor in charge of most of the births. Many doctors didn’t approve of the work he did, even though they didn’t question his being a good doctor, and the fact is that the care he provided was better than that given in many maternity wards.

  He, too, had his reservations about Ayllón’s work, because the man was helping those Galician women to carry on with their backward traditions instead of encouraging them to give birth in a hospital, with the necessary advances; however, as time went by, he ended up deciding that agreeing to accept those women’s cultural criteria had managed to prevent several unfortunate events from happening. And now, years later, nobody gives birth at home in Trintxerpe anymore. He could have told Lynn about it, but he hadn’t remembered about Ayllón when they were talking about the Peruvian girl giving birth at home.

  A fantasy: He goes to Lynn’s house at midnight and knocks on the door. She opens the door ajar, sticks her nose out, and says “hi” happily. Then she opens the door wide for him and, like always, with her back against the wall.

  The sound of an electric toothbrush going from the bathroom to the living room. And back to the bathroom.

  17

  When he comes in, Lynn offers him a Ping-Pong rematch, but Martin goes up the stairs without bothering to answer her. “It must be a bad time,” she says, as the writer disappears, her eyes wide open, her mouth, too, an expression of fear on her face and shaking one hand around in the air. She asks what the expression was in Spanish but then remembers it herself, you say “the oven’s not ready for buns,” buns being another way to say “trouble,” “drama,” or “commotion” in Spanish: “No está el horno para bollos.” The oven’s cold. Her gestures of astonishment are as funny as the way she pronounces the saying. She’s getting used to the writer’s rages, and apparently she finds these explosions of his funny. It’s better this way. Julia, too, takes it with a pinch of salt, although she’s finding his tantrums increasingly unbearable, and after he slams the door, making the fine family crystal on the sideboard tremble, she tries to explain to Lynn the reasons for the writer being particularly angry with women today.

  It all started because a call from his sister in Paris had woken him up. She wanted him to make sure there’s a bouquet of flowers waiting for her friends when they reach their suite in the María Cristina Hotel; as if that weren’t enough, apparently she also told him that instead of the conventional welcome message on the little accompanying card, it would be lovely if he could send them one of his books with a “charming dedication.” When Julia arrived, she found him having a nervous breakdown about this new commission, swearing about his sister, and she thought what was exasperating him was having to write a “charming dedication”; she knows he doesn’t find it easy when people politely ask him to do that, and from what she’s read, many other writers feel the same way. In fact, Martin has a good collection of passages he’s underlined in which writers are put out by having to write dedications, including writers who you wouldn’t normally think of as being easily put off their stride—Joyce, for instance. So he was walking up and down nonstop, swearing about all the trouble his sister always gives him, until she convinced him that the best thing would be to sort out the problem as soon as possible rather than obsessing about it. So he decided to go to the hotel, see that the reservation was all correct, and, at the same time, check that they were going to send him the bill, and then see what to do about the bouquet of flowers. It seems things went well at the hotel—the staff would take care of the flowers—and then, finding himself with renewed energy to complete the task, he went to the bookshop on Okendo Kalea, almost directly across from the hotel, with the idea of asking for the Spanish translation of his Beti euria ari du, which was titled Siempre está lloviendo, meaning “It’s Always Raining.” Since there weren’t any copies of
it on display, he had to get over his embarrassment and go up to the counter, afraid of the not very likely possibility that someone might recognize him, and he asked for New York–Bilbao, too, even though that was actually on display, in order not to seem so egocentric. It was something like buying Tylenol along with a pack of condoms. Even though the clerk told him at first he didn’t think they would have it—“It was published quite a long time ago”—he then saw on the computer that in fact they did have a copy. Julia has to ask Lynn not to laugh, because that’s exactly what Martin told her, and she knows how precise and vociferous he tends to be when he’s been insulted. He told her that while he was waiting for the copy of his book, he saw that there was a woman of around forty in the guidebook section—she was completely anodyne, he wouldn’t recognize her if he saw her again, he emphasized that—speaking in Catalan with a boy who looked to be her son, and suddenly he saw an easy solution to his problem with the dedication: a few conventional words, but written in Catalan, would handsomely meet his sister’s request. Apparently, the vocation itself is what makes it so difficult for authors to write dedications, which isn’t the case for artists and athletes, who usually just sign their name, because writers can’t just put down some clichéd sentence. That, she thinks at least, is what Martin’s problem is—he usually feels obliged to write something original or personal, because he thinks that’s what people expect from somebody they think of as a writer. He could never write With affection or From the heart or anything like that, because people would be disappointed. Julia understands that, and so does Lynn, although she still doesn’t stop laughing. But Martin thought that writing something in Catalan would give it that special touch, at least display his desire to be friendly with his sister’s friends, who were Catalan. He could have written Amb simpatia or Abraçades—Catalan for “with affection” and “hugs”—but he thought that if he asked the “ordinary-looking woman” who was flicking through the guidebooks with her son for help, he would be able to sketch something a bit deeper. Can she, Lynn, imagine how nervous the writer must have been about going up to the woman and asking her to help him find the right words? “Of course.” Naturally, he wouldn’t have been able to introduce himself as a writer who wanted to dedicate one of his books in Catalan. That would have been showing off. He was thinking about the best way to do it, when the mother and son left the bookshop without buying anything. Apparently, it had taken the bookseller some time to find a copy his book, which, to tell the truth, wasn’t in very good condition, and because of that, they were out of sight by the time he left the shop. But all of a sudden, as he was crossing the street—and Julia has to ask Lynn again not to laugh, because the tragedy is about to unfold—he sees them both, the mother and son, sitting on a bench and speaking Catalan, and probably because it was such an unexpected encounter, he went straight up to the woman without thinking twice and asked her if she was Catalan, and even though she looked at him with mistrust when she had answered that she was, he just came out and asked her if she could tell him a few words in Catalan, at the same time taking out his pen and his Hemingway-style notebook with its elastic band—Julia promises Lynn he told this to her with precisely those words—and when the woman, who by this time was looking at him with even greater mistrust, asked him what words he needed, he couldn’t think of anything better to say than “with all my affection,” and as soon as she heard that, the woman sprang to her feet, said she was in a great hurry, and fled, dragging her son behind her. Martin was still upset when he got home, distraught, because now women were taking him to be the sort of depraved man who goes for women in front of their young children.