The director suggests unpaid leave for a couple of months. And that he tell the mother of the child with choanal atresia that he accused Orl as a result of the personal problems between the two of them, that the hospital was in no way to blame, and that it would be better to convince her, for his own good, not to report the incident to the police. The director’s picked up speed and doesn’t give Abaitua any time to answer. The alternative is immediate suspension for interfering with another doctor’s work, for reckless endangerment, for enticing a patient to voluntary discharge, and all of that while being off duty, and, as if that weren’t enough, using hospital material for private purposes. They would report him to the Board and to the Medical Council, and he would unquestionably be barred for several years. Personally, the director respects him a lot, he knows he’s a good doctor, and because of that, he strongly recommends Abaitua accept the proposal and offer to try to call Arrese and Orl off himself.
The director puts his elbows firmly on his desk and leans forward to look at him from close up. In a confidential tone, he says that Abaitua can’t deny his behaviour has been curious lately to say the least, and Abaitua thinks he’s moved in close like that in order to check if the stains on his shirt are wine. He buttons his jacket and stands up. Let them bar him if they have to.
He’s just taking his shirt off when Arrese walks into his office. He doesn’t knock, and Orl comes in after him. “Eres un inconsecuente, un inmaduro,” he almost shouts. He says that—that he’s reckless and immature—in Spanish, more because he’s angry than because Orl’s there, Abaitua thinks. Orl doesn’t raise his voice when he says that he’s mad. Abaitua doesn’t pay them any attention. He puts on a clean shirt and starts sticking papers into a briefcase, without looking at what exactly he’s putting in, just wanting to make it clear he’s leaving. He has to push Orl away from the door to get out. There are people standing frozen and staring in the hallway. He hears Arrese’s voice behind him, “You won’t be able to drag yourself out of this one.” Abaitua turns around and points a finger at him, “But it’s you two who are going to have to pay.” White smocks move aside to let him through to the stairs. He doesn’t see their faces.
The front door has been locked with a single turn of the key, but he finds there’s nobody there when he looks around. As he could have expected, there are signs that Loiola has been there—he’s drunk a cup of coffee in the kitchen and gone through a couple of closets in his bedroom.
After the shower he’s been so needing, he sits down in front of the television in the living room in his robe, because he doesn’t want to go to sleep so early. There are a few photo albums on the table, and he deduces that Loiola’s been looking at them. He’s been looking at photos a lot recently, and has even taken a few away with him, and he asks questions about them—who’s this or that, where are they, what are they doing? It’s something Abaitua doesn’t like; he’s always hated photos, and they seldom suggest a happy past to him. Many are loose and out of order. In one of them, Pilar is wearing her red coat, which he remembers so well from back then. She’s laughing with her mouth wide open, showing off her enviable teeth. Her eyes are laughing, too. But she told him that she always felt unhappy, extremely unhappy, whenever she wore that coat.
When he gets into bed, the room is in half-light, which he likes. He also likes having a big bed to himself, even though he hardly moves from his spot at one edge of it. He’s about to fall asleep when the phone rings. It’s Pilar again, telling him her return trip’s been delayed once more. They’re working really hard and learning a lot. We are; we’re doing, we’re going . . . All ways of saying once more that she isn’t alone, her use of the first person plural stands out. She only uses the singular at the end, to say that she’s tired and she wants to come home.
He’s sure, with regard to her use of the first person plural, that her relationship with the young surgeon is purely professional. He’s sure she’s holding true to her promise not to have other relationships without telling him about them, without specifically breaking up with him first, without taking a purely implicit freedom for granted as she did back then. He remembers that when she came home, she was sitting on the edge of the bed he’s lying on right now, and she was still wearing her red coat. “I felt abandoned,” she said. Before that, she’d moaned, “I fell asleep,” as if the worst of it was arriving home late, at around eight in the morning, he thinks.
He’s never fallen asleep in another woman’s bed.
He tries to shake that memory off and reexamine everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours. He remembers Lynn. She’s sitting behind him and hugging him. “In the arms of an angel,” she whispers in his ear, while moving his elbows up and down. “Fly away.” He remembers her in her new dress, saying cheese and smiling, in the photograph Kepa took of them in front of the statue of the bronze angel holding the soldier with the broken sword.
He remembers that the statue is in the Place Jean Moulin and is titled Gloria Victis, and that the angel holds the fallen soldier up with its arms wrapped around his thighs, so that their two heads are close together, and the fallen soldier has his arms spread wide, the hand he holds up to the sky is empty and open, and the angel’s wings are pointing downward.
19
As she opens the iron gate, Julia can’t understand how they could have put up with the terrible screeching noise it made until Lynn finally put some oil on it. Another example of their increasing neglect of the garden—the poor girl’s the only one who makes any effort. The sun is already heating up the side of the house that faces the train stop, but the blinds in Martin’s room are still down. The shutters on Lynn’s windows are closed, too, and that’s really astonishing at such a late hour. As she walks toward the empty-looking house, she has no uncertain feeling that she’s going to come across something bad there, and with the keys still in her hands, she pauses at the bottom of the stairs for a moment. She had forgotten about that bad feeling she sometimes gets standing in front of the house, the fear she makes herself feel by straining to see some sign of life. She admits that she’s gotten used to Lynn being there, to the pleasant thought of seeing her there watering the plants or raking up leaves.
She walks around the house to check that all the blinds are down, and then an old image, one she thought she’d forgotten about, comes to mind. She’s in the half-light of the living room, trying to see if there are any alterations to the usual chaos there, listening to the silence, which extends beyond the empty hallway, a silence broken by the sharp sound of the library door as she opens it and by the creaking of each step on the wooden stairs as she goes up them. She can hear her own heartbeats as she puts her ear to the bedroom door, and then she hears nothing, absolutely nothing, as she tiptoes into the darkness and feels rather than sees that he’s not moving. She remains by the bed, not daring to touch him, hoping to get some sign that he’s still breathing. Finally, she works up her courage, takes him under his arms, and shakes him; she starts screaming in horror and nobody comes to her call.
Julia breathes deeply to dispel the images, overcomes her hysterical fear, and opens the door. She raises the blind in the living room, just enough to be able to tidy up the room a little, picks up the tray on the armchair in front of the television with the remains of a dinner on it, and takes it to the kitchen, trying not to make any noise. It wasn’t always like that. In the early days, when she came to the house so late in the morning, she would walk around in a natural way, perhaps even making more noise than usual so that he would wake up, thinking that he would like that, just as she likes hearing noises coming from the kitchen when she wakes up—the promise of a fortifying breakfast, the meal she most enjoys. And the other days, when she got there early, she would go up the stairs in silence, walking on the right-hand side, like now, so the stairs wouldn’t make any noise, and then, too, she would put her ear to the door, but it would be with the expectation of hearing him say “I’m awake,” explaining
that he’d been up writing until dawn. Sometimes he’d ask her to lie down with him for a bit, and she would.
It isn’t like that now. She hears him breathing regularly on the other side of the door, making a slight sound as he exhales—it isn’t quite snoring—a sign that he’s tired. Then she goes down the stairs, making some effort not to make noise on them, but not too much—she doesn’t want to make herself nervous again.
Julia finds it a bit sad that she prefers him to be asleep.
But it’s also true that knowing he’s asleep makes it easier for her to go onto his computer, although she’s not completely relaxed about it, because she hasn’t yet gotten over her scruples, even though she tells herself each time that she’s only doing it to see how he’s getting on with Gizona ispiluaren aurrean. Her curiosity has never taken her beyond that document, and in fact, she doesn’t exactly read it, either; she just has a glance at it to check whether he’s made any progress, and, depending on that, to see what sort of mood he may be in. It’s a habit that’s similar in a way to tapping on the barometer every day to see whether the needle’s pointing to poor or fair weather.
This time, she sees he’s written quite a lot. The writer has decided to leave home for the first time in a long while to go and buy a beret. Apparently humans lose sixty percent of their body heat through their head, and it doesn’t make any sense to wear thick jackets and coats and then walk around bareheaded, as people do here, even people who are as bald as a coot. The decision to buy a hat comes at the end of a long process of reflection, one Julia is familiar with because Martin explained it all to her when he bought a beret himself.
He thinks classic Borsalino style hats are pretentious, and going out of your way to choose an informal or sporty hat—whether one of those floppy ones that look like they’re for going salmon fishing in Scotland, or hats with visors, both canvas ones (like baseball caps, which retired people seem to like so much) or those made of any other sort of cloth, above all British looking ones—is a denial of the beret, and that denial seems to him to involve obvious psychological, social, and political factors. From a certain age onward, a beret positions a man as he should be, making him look more like his grandfather. On the other hand, there is also some prejudice against them, fed by the fact that berets are still used nowadays to crown stupidity. Some people even say that getting rid of berets is the same as leaving atavism behind and embracing modernity—“Que viajen, que se quiten la boina de una vez,” they say, telling them they need to travel and get rid of their berets once and for all. And in the Basque Country, the problem also has a symbolic side to it, with some people using it to stand up for certain things. Even though that’s the case, or perhaps precisely because it is, depending on how you look at it, Martin chose to get a beret—even though he very seldom wears it—and that’s what the man in front of the mirror decides to do, too. He doesn’t want to renounce the beret just because some people claim it as their own or because of what some other people might think; he decides to humbly accept the fact that it makes him look the same age as his grandfather when he thought him very old, just as being naked probably does.
He gives his long soliloquy while trying on the wide-brimmed black beret that the lady in the Leclercq hat shop on Narrika Kalea hands to him. He would have preferred a smaller one, in the European rather than the Basque style, to wear tight on his head in the way he’s seen Sándor Márai and George Steiner used to, but the shopkeeper thinks quite the opposite. She says that a proper Basque beret, a real txapela, has to be wide, and even more so when the man wearing it is good-looking, like him. While he’s trying on the beret, which he doesn’t like because it’s too wide, in the mirror he sees the shop door opening. It’s Marie Lafôret. Julia’s pulse beats faster when the character unexpectedly appears, and for the first time since she started her spying, she reads the progress he’s made with special interest, curious to find out how such a promising meeting goes. He regrets their meeting taking place with him looking at himself in the mirror, looking so vulgar, and he steps out of the way and discreetly takes off the beret. Then he goes back to the counter and asks the Leclercq lady to show him some blue berets. He prefers blue to black, in spite of its historical connotations—the Falangists wore that color, and right-wing Donostians had, too—or maybe because of them, not wanting people to think he’s somehow reaffirming his abertzale credentials. Blue berets also look more modern, less txapela-like, he says to the lady, who has to go into the back room to see if there are any blue berets there, because blue berets don’t sell in Donostia. “It’s more of a Bilbao thing,” she says, with something like disapproval, as she disappears, and the two customers are left alone waiting at the counter. The writer ventures to look at Lafôret from the corner of his eye. She has that special aura about her, the one television personalities do when they suddenly appear in person, although she doesn’t seem to be aware of it herself. She doesn’t seem to mind having to wait. She spends the time looking at the hats and caps on display on the shelf across from them while twirling a black beret with a pompom around on the counter, until, suddenly, she turns to him and, her arms spread almost entirely open, says, “My goodness! Is that you? Is that actually you?” He doesn’t know what to say, happy because he’s met a beautiful television presenter, but feeling awkward, too. Her gesture—holding her arms apart—and her quiet smile show that she’s friendly, and she moves in closer to him until she’s almost touching him, as if wanting to show him that it’s really her. They give each other two kisses. “What are you doing?”
He doesn’t know what to say and is about to tell her that he’s buying a beret, but she doesn’t give him the chance, adding almost without waiting that she’s heard that he’s about to publish something, and he manages to stammer that she’s right, he’s about to finish a novel that’s been taking him longer than he had hoped. He brushes his hair back with both hands, glad that he’s stopped taking the treatment; at least he doesn’t have yellow eyes now. “You don’t know how many of your admirers are waiting for that novel.” She seems to be sincere, and he feels proud again, but ill at ease, too. He doesn’t know how to answer her, and finally, he tells her that he never misses her program. He also says that “at home”—he doesn’t know why he uses that expression, but it’s what comes out—they call her Marie Lafôret, and she accepts this without showing any surprise, saying it’s not the first time she’s heard it. La fille aux yeux d’or. She laughs, and even so, her wonderful eyes are still sweetly sad. Perhaps he doesn’t know, she says, that Marie Lafôret’s heritage is Armenian, like Silvye Vartan and Aznavour, and her real name is Maïténa, written with an umlaut, which is a coincidence, because she calls herself Maite. And she adds that like everything “genuinely French,” she comes from somewhere else.
There aren’t any blue berets at Leclercq. The lady from the shop repeats that it’s a Bilbao thing and that he should try on the widerimmed black one again. He’s reluctant to do that. He’s embarrassed to try it on in front of the television presenter, but there’s no way out of it. Both women are looking at him, both say complementary things, and both say he needs one size bigger. Sixty-one. While the shopkeeper goes into the back room, he talks about berets, about men being afraid that they’ll make them look like their grandfathers. Because, in general, their fathers don’t wear them. Lafôret listens to his reflections with attention, says he should write an essay about it—he would, he says, if he didn’t have so much work already—and nods from time to time. But when Faustino Iturbe talks about the problems associated with them—the fact that many ethnic and religious groups use them as identity signifiers—Marie Lafôret says that’s exactly why they should be worn, to stop those people from becoming their exclusive owners and turning their use into their own private symbol. A perfect metaphor. In fact, you could say that she’s an expert on the subject of berets, because she made a documentary about them, and he’s quite frustrated that she should know that beret colors have always
been used to distinguish factions in the Basque Country and that even though Zumalakarregi, the Carlist general, wore a red beret, the original Carlist version was white and the liberals’ beret was red. She even uses her wonderful voice to sing to him that line about the girls of Azkoitia having plenty of reasons not to dance with the red berets—“Azkoitiko neskatxak arrazoiarekin / ez dute nahi dantzatu txapelgorriekin.”
He tries to overcome his embarrassment at having told her things he thought quite original but that she, in fact, already knew all about, and then embarrassed at still having to try on the beret with the two women looking on at him. They both say it really looks good on him, and the presenter doesn’t hold back her compliments—he looks very handsome, extremely interesting. As far as the subject of whether he wouldn’t be better off with a smaller one is concerned (and he doesn’t mention Sándor Márai or Steiner, but a photo of Beckett comes to mind, wearing a beret like a bonnet), the presenter agrees with the shopkeeper—no way, small berets are incredibly ugly, only fit for farm workers from Extremadura. The two women, looking at him from their height—the Leclercq lady is very tall, too—stick to their opinion without expressing any doubt at all, and he doesn’t dare to stand up for his own idea. The presenter’s recommendation: the secret to wearing a beret with elegance, as with all types of clothing, is to wear it in a natural way, without prejudice, in the way foreigners do. Ian McKellen wore a black beret when he was awarded the Donostia Prize at the film festival, and she says he looked much more interesting with the beret on than bareheaded.
Martutene Page 75
