Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Defeated by these arguments, Faustino Iturbe has no choice but to buy the black beret. And he’s going to put it on right then and there. While he’s waiting for his change, the presenter picks a red beret up from the counter and shows him how to put it on, “using a single hand,” and elegantly lifting up her chin, as if to draw attention to herself, she asks him how she looks, whether she looks more like a barmaid or an Ertzainatza officer.

  He says she looks very beautiful.

  He could leave then, but he decides to remain by the counter, and Marie Lafôret explains, seemingly as much to him as to the shopkeeper, that she always wears a black beret with a pompom, like a French sailor, but because the one she has is worn out, she needs a new one. The shopkeeper goes into the back room again to see if they have any left, and he wonders if it would be too daring for him to suggest to the beautiful presenter—who’s looking at a Danborrada hat, the sort worn during Donostia’s drumming festival, and admiring the gold-colored cords all over it—that he could wait for her to finish making her purchase and then they could leave the shop together and go grab a coffee or a beer together. He’s sure she’d accept if he suggested it, completely sure, more so than with any other woman he’s ever met before. Her way of smiling tells him that, her agreeable way of talking and listening to him. Her easygoing, natural presence.

  The Leclercq lady, who’s found a beret with a pompom on it, proudly explains to them the detailed work that went into the making of the Danborrada hat—which, judging by its decorations, must be a general’s—Lafôret happily tries it on, with no inhibition whatsoever, and it falls right down to her nose. The lady talks to them as if they were together. Two old friends who’ve met up in the shop by chance, and she would certainly be surprised if he just walked out and left the television presenter there trying on the beret with the pompom. What’s more, he feels very relaxed next to her—he’s always admired her beauty, sweetness, and sophistication—but suddenly he realizes that they’ve met each other too late, that there’s no future for them, and he feels the need to leave. So he says he has to go, before she tries the beret on, and just in case she might try to hold him back or something like that, he adds that he’s very late for an appointment. They say goodbye, and he’s already turned toward the door when he hears her say, “Are we going to see each other again?” Her voice has the soft, musical tone typical of Lower Navarre, and he replies that he hopes so. Give me your number, she asks, taking out her phone, and he gives it her. She presses the keys with a young person’s skill, and his phone rings immediately. “Add me to your contacts,” she says.

  She makes a final movement with her hand to say goodbye. “Txapela burian ibili mundian!” She’s used the old Basque saying—put your beret on and go see the world. He spends the rest of the afternoon in his study. He tries to get Marie Lafôret out of his head; after making the firm decision not to call her, he also thinks about the possibility of not watching her on the television any more.

  On reality imitating art. The writer looks in his archives. He always has the idea that he needs to clean everything up before it’s too late. He has many duplicate copies of his documents, which he makes because of his fear of losing them, as well as different copies of the same pieces of work in different stages of completion. He dares to erase what seem to be exact copies—even that he finds a struggle—and destroying the remains of previous versions of his final documents is a relief. He has a lot of unfinished stories, most of them short sketches, things he’s written, things from his imagination, “which reality has written new versions of.” She’s heard Martin say that a thousand times. “Love and War”—the story of a couple that ends with the husband throwing his wife off the sixth floor of a building. He finished the story and it had been published when, shortly afterward, a news agency in Valencia reported on the very same thing having happened. It wouldn’t have been an amazing coincidence for a man to throw his wife out of a window—although not an everyday occurrence, it isn’t all that unusual—if the only point in common had been it being the sixth floor. But the floor wasn’t the only thing in common between the fictional and real events, there was more than that: the victim’s name—Flora, as always—and the murderer’s alibi and cover-up strategy—blaming his wife’s lover—were also the same. At dinner parties, Martin used to have the rather infantile tendency to marvel at reality imitating art, and he would even go so far as to imagine, though only as a joke, that the police would take his story to be the Valencian killer’s source of inspiration, although this hypothesis was far from probable, since it had only ever been published in Basque.

  “Zuk bai ulertzen nauzula,” another story of his, is also about the problems a couple are having. The title translates in English to “You Actually Do Understand Me.” They both feel miscomprehended by the other, there’s no communication between them, they hardly speak to one another. They both take refuge in relationships with online partners, looking for comfort. In both cases, the online couples open up to each other and talk about the harsh words, the bad treatment, and above all the lack of respect they each receive from their real-life partners, in full detail, and they say nice things to console each other. They understand each other. The electronic exchange lasts a long time, they come to feel close. They grow to understand each other better and better and, above all, are increasingly understanding with one another regarding the treatment they’re getting from their respective partners, until finally it’s obvious and they each realize that their confidant is actually their real partner. A news agency reported that the same thing had just happened somewhere or other in the world, but in that case, Martin wasn’t able to demonstrate that he had had his idea before the real event occurred, because he had no more than a draft when it came out in the newspapers; he had the original contents, but nobody other than himself could confirm that, and he was really put out, because he was afraid that people wouldn’t believe him. Julia could confirm his version, but not without admitting that she used to sneak onto his computer. Once, the subject came up when they were with some friends, and Julia took pity on him and ventured to say that he was right, that she remembered very well that he told her the story before it came out in the newspapers, almost giving herself away, because he had a strict rule about not saying anything about whatever he was writing while he was still writing it. He must have taken it for a white lie, and nothing happened.

  In another story, titled “Heriotza baino saihestezinago”, or “Less Avoidable Than Death,” an army officer who’s tired of life decides to commit suicide in his family’s mausoleum, wearing the clothes he’d like to be buried in, his dress uniform, with all his many medals on his chest, simply wanting to spare his own corpse and his relatives the irritating procedures that go along with death; but what he doesn’t take into account is that his decision is just going to make things more complicated, because they always do autopsies in cases of suicide, and so they have to take his body from the mausoleum to the morgue, from there to the funeral parlor, and then back to the cemetery, and in the end they bury him in an ordinary civilian suit because his dress uniform had gotten splattered with blood and the family didn’t have time to take it to the cleaners. In this case, too, the newspapers published the story of something similar happening in Madrid a few months after he’d written his draft. According to the articles, a gentleman—who turned out to be an army officer—showed up at the Almudena Cemetery and asked to be cremated. After the employees told him that it was impossible, explaining that they were only allowed to burn cadavers, the man decided to shoot himself, and inside his family’s mausoleum, no less. Another excuse for Martin to show off about reality basing itself on his ideas, but with the frustration of not being able to prove it, “Heriotza baino saihestezinago,” too, being no more than an unpublished draft. It was pathetic to see him setting himself forward as an example when he spoke about reality imitating art, and one day, when Julia was in a bad mood, they quarreled about it. Tired of hearing him
say the same thing for the thousandth time, she came out and told him that reality was always better than what he called art, because the real officer’s request to be cremated, something which isn’t in his story, was amazing, she thought, and she still thinks so now—you just have to imagine the conversation he must have had with the people working there. He didn’t speak to her for a long time afterward.

  The man in front of the mirror has often thought about writing a short essay on the topic of reality and fiction, which would allow him to make use of the couple of dozen sketches and synopses of stories he has filed away without having to develop them any further, in order to do something with them before reality itself or some other writer is inspired by the same ideas; it would also be a way of insuring his ownership of the ideas. From time to time, he starts working on the stories, to complete and round them off in the quickest, most direct way possible, but he doesn’t think he has the time to write an essay that could justifiably be published. He also considers the possibility of just publishing his ideas for the stories, under the title Stories I Haven’t Written, but he doesn’t think he has enough material to make it into a whole book. He’s reflecting about this when his telephone beeps to tell him he has a message. It’s her, of course, Marie Lafôret. “It was lovely meeting up like that. Your beret brought us together—another reason for you to wear it. What’s going to bring about our second meeting? Will there be a second meeting?”

  Faustino Iturbe doesn’t know how to classify all the feelings the message brings out in him. They are many and contradictory. Agreeable, because the most beautiful television presenter is interested in him; frustrating, because the opportunity to meet her has arrived so late on; and perhaps for that same reason, thinking it so late on, he doesn’t feel the nervousness he would have once in the same situation, it doesn’t make him feel so ill at ease.

  His answer: “I hope so.” Without thinking it over much; it seems to him the only thing he can say. And he leaves it at that.

  There’s a rough wind, and one of the shutters on the top floor breaks loose and bangs against the wall. It happens with the same window every time there’s wind from the northwest. Julia turns her computer off and starts going upstairs to close it and stop it from breaking. She hears a cough. It’s his way of saying that he’s awake, and she isn’t sure whether or not to open the door and say good morning. She decides to do so, pointlessly knocking on the door first and asking if he’s awake. Then, as she raises the blind, he hides his head under the sheets. It’s horribly stuffy. So she pulls the curtains aside and opens the balcony door. Because the room faces south, the wind is hardly noticeable, the only sign of it is the movement of the highest branch on the tree. She tells him it’s very late and it’s a beautiful day, like a mother trying to get her children out of bed, and he gives an excuse—he hasn’t slept a wink. Julia imagines that Lafôret must be the reason he hasn’t slept, and to be nice, she asks him if he’s had any nightmares. He mumbles his answer—how could he have nightmares if he’s just told her he wasn’t able to sleep? “The woman upstairs” stopped him from sleeping. He complains that she made a terrible amount of noise. Julia doesn’t want to listen to any more, she starts to leave, so that he’ll see that she disapproves of him keeping tabs on what Lynn is up to, but when she reaches the door, she hears signs of life from the floor above, and, unconsciously, she looks toward the ceiling. He must have taken this as a signal that she’s interested, because he insists that she has to believe him. He sits up in bed and says it was scandalous, and he looks as if he’s hallucinating; what little hair he has left is all in a mess and standing on end. “It’s been a scandalous night.” He protests with greater conviction and firmness than on other occasions and, above all, asks her to believe him. He’d been up writing until late, and when he finally went to sleep, he was awoken by the phone of “the woman upstairs.” He heard her going around the house and opening and closing doors until, eventually, she ran down the stairs. Since he couldn’t get to sleep, he got up and tried to continue writing, until he became exhausted again in the dawn light, but by the time he got to sleep, he heard them on the stairs again, the two of them this time, one running after the other to catch up, as if they were having a race. They were talking, laughing, sighing, groaning, and wailing, much more than usual, and when they stopped for a moment, he was so tired that he dropped off to sleep, but right away, once again, they woke him back up when her friend left, and he made an incredible noise as he went down the stairs, because he tripped a couple of times. He says they had both been drunk when they came back.

  “At least this way they keep you awake to write your novel.” She laughs so he doesn’t have any doubt that she’s joking, but even so, he looks at her severely. “How’s it going?” she asks him then, and he shrugs his shoulders. “I’m at a critical moment.” He has to do some thinking before he can go any further.

  “Don’t think too much, let it flow.”

  He looks at her in silence, measuring the meaning of her words.

  “Aren’t you ever going to tell me what it’s about?”

  “It isn’t about anything. The thoughts somebody has while he sits there with a pencil in his hand. Something like Malone meurt, though not quite like that.”

  A reply that stops her from asking any more questions. But Julia’s sure he’s met Marie Lafôret.

  While Julia puts the food into the cats’ bowls, the two house cats sniff at it, while the non-house cat stays a few yards away. It won’t come up to its bowl, the guest bowl, until the other two satisfy their hunger; it will sniff at it and sometimes even stir it around while the others go off to digest their food by the woodpile or the flowerbed, depending on the weather. Today the wind from the northwest has brought some clouds with it. She sees Lynn looking at them from her window. Who knows how long she’s been there. She makes a silent gesture that means “hi” and then asks her to come up—no words with that, either, as if she didn’t want the writer to find out.

  The house is full of light. The top floor, which is higher than the Indian chestnut tree, gets more light than the ground floor. Martin’s grandparents’ dark, heavy piece of furniture rescued from the basement, looks cheerful in that clean place. Lynn’s very tastefully placed objects around here and there, and she’s even covered some of the furniture with patterned cotton cloth—to protect them from Max’s claws, she says—the armchairs, for instance. The house Julia never had, the house she’d like to have for herself, one where there would be no excuses for not writing. Tidy, in order, with flowers in it. She only has time to look at the books and the four or five engravings on the walls, which, because it’s a small apartment, take up the whole space. Then Lynn, after saying that she wants to talk, tells her to sit down next to her on the sofa. The wedding sofa. She knows they make love there, and because of that, having to sit there makes her feel something like apprehension. She’d rather sit in the armchair across from it, on the other side of the triangular table, which doesn’t look like something belonging to Martin’s grandparents. She asks her about it, in order to justify standing up, worried Lynn may guess what she’s thinking. As Julia suspected, Lynn bought the table, and finally, Julia decides to sit next to her, closer than usual, not wanting her to think for a moment that she’s trying to avoid being intimate with her.

  Sitting on the sofa, they hear the very clear sound of a toilet being flushed, and she has the sensation that the space around her is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, like on occasions when she’s seen her own kitchen from a neighbor’s window. The phone rings, and Martin doesn’t pick up—she didn’t tell him that she was going when Lynn asked her up—and they hear him quite clearly, his slow steps along the hallway, and the bedroom door opening. There’s no need for them to say that they can hear everything. Lynn smiles with an expression halfway between that of an accomplice and that of somebody with regrets, and Julia can’t help remembering Martin sitting exactly beneath where they
are now, on the edge of the bed, pointing at the ceiling and listening to their cries of pleasure, and Lynn’s angry voice, so unusual in her, shooing the cat away—“Get out of here, Max”—and the loud noise of the cat jumping down onto the floor.

  By the way, where is Max?

  Lynn apologizes for Max’s naughtiness as she always does, as if she were excusing a shy child for not coming out to greet the visitors. He’s just as shameless once he gets to know you as he is shy before that. Julia asks her about the cat, out of a stupid need to buy time and put off the moment when Lynn is going to take her into her confidence; she’s sure she’s brought her up here to tell her about her relationship with Abaitua, that she doesn’t want it to remain a secret any longer. She knows that, just as she knew that the cat would run and hide beneath the sofa as soon as she came into the room. Why is that beautiful, elusive cat—which moves to the back of the sofa when she goes down on all fours to try to tempt it out—called Max? Lynn’s attitude is like that of a teacher waiting for a naughty pupil to take her place so that she can start the class, and that makes Julia feel like she shouldn’t ask her the question. So she gets back up and sits down on the sofa again, her back up straight, her arms determinedly crossed, acting the pupil, attentive to whatever it is Lynn has to say. Lynn laughs at the joke, opens her mouth a little, and looks as if she’s going to say something, but doesn’t. She covers her face with both hands, then takes them away and smiles again.