Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  There are more people than usual at the station. Young people dressed casually, with backpacks and computers hanging off their shoulders. They’ve obviously come for the film festival. Contrary to what the Basque weather service predicted, it’s a beautiful afternoon. The sun’s going down, and there’s a terrific noise coming from the birds in the trees across the way alongside the river. They’re starlings, apparently, and they spend the night fighting for a good place on the branches. Then, suddenly, a whole flock of them takes flight, hundreds of birds rising quickly to go to the other side of the river. Immediately, another flock takes flight—who would have thought there could be so many birds in a single tree—and takes the same route as the previous one. Thousands of birds covering the sky, but nobody looks up to see them.

  At the Pukas surf shop, she feels incredibly old as she picks out a sweatshirt and a couple of T-shirts. She wonders whether to buy him a surf watch, but it’s too expensive, bearing in mind that she has to pay for Martin’s present, too. She’s long had her eye on a type of zippered case at the Tamayo stationery store—she isn’t sure whether it’s leather, but it looks it—fitted out with all the basic equipment for drawing and doing watercolors: pencils, brushes, the water colors themselves, around a dozen of them, a foldaway plastic cup for water. It’s her fantasy. Traveling around with somebody, walking and stopping from time to time, drawing and writing descriptions of the countryside, shrines, and special buildings. She’d like Zigor to be able to do that. She remembers Lynn once told her that Abaitua and this Kepa guy used to do that, and of course, that the last time her son was at Martin’s house, he really liked Danièle Ohnheiser’s series of travel watercolors—Promenade à Villa Borghese, Voyage à Rome, and the rest—and that he was moved when he heard that you don’t really see things until you draw them. He takes things Martin says to heart. She thinks the bag of watercolors is a good present to get on Martin’s behalf, it’s a little old-fashioned, in a serious, cultured way, and she knows he’ll like it a lot, above all because he’ll think it’s from Martin.

  There are two elderly women in front of her waiting to pay, both très comme il faut, and they’re both buying decorative things, colored paper napkins, and other little goodies, many other little goodies, for the birthday tea they’re throwing for one of their grandchildren, and with the naturalness that comes from class and habit, they ask for each item to be separately wrapped and to have its own little bow put on it. Two old women who could easily be from the upscale Calle Serrano in Madrid. They talk about the weather while they wait and make other people wait, too. They say it’s lucky there’s good weather for the people who’ve come to the film festival—that complete deference to visitors and, when it comes down to it, money, which is so typical in tourist cities—it’s been a bad summer, and autumn’s usually quite good in Donostia. One of them makes a statement: “Autumn in Donostia is beautiful, it could be the most beautiful autumn anywhere.” The other lady contradicts her, saying that spring is the prettiest season in Donostia. They both turn around and look at Julia, as if to ask her opinion on the matter, and remembering The Man in Front of the Mirror, she thinks that autumn, at least in Donostia, is the best season of the year to die. “When summer’s run its course, and we feel hard winter’s cold fingers, and it’s too long to wait for spring.”

  She turns left off Legazpi onto Peñaflorida Kalea to walk back along the river to the station, but she has time to spare and sits down on a bench in Okendo Plaza to continue reading the story. There’s not much left. With a little regret, she admits, she sees that the television presenter does not appear again, and she notices that the scenes from the beginning of the book in which the man in front of the mirror is reflecting on his own decline are repeated again, him mawkishly imagining his own death, enjoying feeling sorry for himself even though he knows it’s a pathetic thing to do, and there are a few flashes of irony throughout the text. It isn’t wonderful. Before she continues reading, and peeking to see what the conclusion is, her heart misses a beat, and she almost drops the sheets of paper onto the ground when she sees that the narrative ends with a long letter to Flora Ugalde. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and stays like that, immobile, trying not to cry, building up strength to be able to read the letter that serves as an epilogue.

  My darling Flora,

  I didn’t take your call, because I didn’t want to see you, or, more exactly, because I didn’t want you to see me in the state I was in, crying my eyes out, plunged deep in self-pity. And I preferred to say what I wanted to say in writing—we get tangled up in words, Flora. The thing is, when you turned up shortly afterward, I imagined you’d called to check if I was at home or not, and you didn’t come to see me, you came because you thought I wasn’t there. I held my breath when I realized you were at the library door, ready to tell you that you’d caught me right in the middle of a sentence. How many times have I told you I’m writing? And your reasons for interrupting have always seemed trivial to me. Right in the middle of a sentence. What does that sound like? Stuck in the middle of a storm, or in the middle of a tunnel. In fact, you very seldom ever interrupted me while I was writing, and you didn’t this time, either. You tiptoed away. I went on writing for the sake of it, writing without having anything to say, thinking that perhaps I’d suddenly get the tone right and what might be the last sentence would come out. I was moved by your silence and by your going upstairs to the bedroom. You were folding your clothes on the bed with an open suitcase next to you, and it seemed a very intimate scene to me. That really was an ending to something, and I felt the urge to write. “I saw her folding her clothes and putting them into a suitcase.” I couldn’t tear myself away, I was as fascinated as ever to watch the ease and perfection with which you fold things. Like a shop assistant. I know the technique, you’ve shown me a thousand times, but I never manage to get the row of buttons to end up in the middle. I was about to say that to you when you realized I was there, but all we did was look at each other. I hurried out of the room before you could say anything to me, because I remembered that I hadn’t cleaned the bathroom after emptying my catheter. I had to go right in the middle of a sentence, to put it that way, and what’s more, I won’t deny that I took a sort of pleasure in letting myself go in my own rotting. I didn’t know whether to go back to the bedroom or not, I thought it was going to be hard for me not to mention my condition, and that doing so might seem like an unscrupulous attempt to keep you by my side in order to keep me company until the end. So I went downstairs to the living room and turned on the radio. They gave the weather forecast for the whole of the film festival—although pointing out that predictions more than two days into the future aren’t very trustworthy—saying there was a high-pressure system over the Azores and that could mean sunny weather for the next ten days. I wanted to start crying again, and I needed you to leave me alone so that I could. So I did everything I could think of to let you know that I wanted you to go, throwing some sheet music onto the table and saying it was yours for you to take, and some books, including Woolf’s The Waves, though we never agreed if it was yours or mine. You looked at me sadly and said, “One day, later on, we’ll talk,” and I agreed. I got through the night as best I could and cleaned myself thoroughly this morning. I write this sentence and my body pushes me to continue and set down the following: “So the women don’t have to.” I can’t help it, right now my narcissism is more present than ever, and now, when I’m about to become a corpse, I’m envious of those bodies wrapped in white for burial, surrounded by women dressed in black veils, dabbing perfumed oil on themselves, and grieving people, sobbing and crying out loud. You can laugh. I’ve decided to hold back my morbid fantasies, because I know there’s nothing you find more revolting than people letting themselves go. And you can laugh again. I remember one moment when I was writing, carried along by a feeling of fascination at the idea of my own decomposition, and you were reading the book by that friend of Frisch who decides to let himself
die of cancer and who spent the nine months he went on living—exactly the time a pregnancy lasts—writing down his reflections and experiences. You made a lot of sarcastic comments. You read me one passage in which he and Frisch, who’s gone to visit him at his house in Ticino, are throwing the meat from his freezer out onto the mountainside—I don’t know if that was very ecological—because it all rotted during a power outage. His friend realizes that soon, he’s going to be the one rotting, and he knows that Frisch is thinking the same thing, he can see it in his eyes. (You said that there was nothing original whatsoever in what you called that morbid pleasure—anyone who’s gotten beyond the level of chimpanzees, however dumb they may be, knows that one day they’re going to be rotten meat, but they don’t go around telling people about it.) So let me say that I’ve taken my time in the shower because I’ve been thinking of you, remembering some other times when I took an especially long time in there, just in case—it was something we hardly ever arranged beforehand—our bodies were going to come together later on, and that possibility made me feel that this broken-down, ready-for-burial body of mine was healthy and beautiful. I started moving away from you a long time ago, not wanting you to realize. Now it’s solitude I want, because I’m afraid I won’t be able to face up to it, that I’ll cry pitifully, terrified and begging for a delay that’s impossible, making you suffer and lose your patience. (I remember I once read that Gayarre, the tenor, lived in a state of constant mortification as a result of the public’s negative view of his acting ability, and when he was about to leave this life, agonizing on his deathbed, he said, “Let’s see them say now that I don’t know how to pull of dying.”) It’s true that everyone dies with some sort of dignity, we do what we can, “on fait comme on peut,” as Beckett would have put it. When you said “finish that fucking novel once and for all,” I pretended to be hurt, but I wasn’t. My literature isn’t the type you like, but I know you respect it. That’s one way to put it. You’d respect my work just as much if I made matchstick models of the Eiffel Tower and other structures, or if I collected butterflies. What you hate is that my writing or not being able to write—because, in fact, it’s that, too—has sucked up my life and put limits on yours at the same time. You resigned yourself to it, because you thought there was no alternative, just like one of those women, obvious differences aside, who sneak drugs into prison for their husbands when they’re in there. I could have told you that. I find it painful to have renounced so many things, everything, in fact. But I didn’t tell you. It occurred to me that I could take the sheet music out of your bag and tell you to fill it instead with whatever you’d need to spend a few days together in Sicily. It was no more than a fleeting idea, of course. I feel I don’t have any strength, and I can’t help remembering the journey Frisch and his dying friend went on to Egypt, and their journey back in a Swiss rescue plane, a drainage tube in his mouth and two nurses to look after him. It wasn’t a good idea.

  I’m all right. I’ve always thought that man’s least noble trait and also his most valuable one is being able to adapt. We get used to all sorts of horrors. When we hear about some misfortune—the rape and murder of a child, let’s say—we wonder how the parents can deal with the suffering. How is it they don’t throw themselves out a window, unable to deal with the suffering? It isn’t a matter of going on living, but choosing the right tie for the shirt, waiting for your change when you go out to buy bread, thinking ahead so as not to get caught out in the rain. Things you just do. Even knowing myself to be condemned, I’ve carried on living fairly normally, even enjoying wonderful moments, things I never even noticed previously. On many occasions, such as when that long-tailed bushtit perches on the windowsill—and please excuse me if I get corny, but this is how I see it—I’ve felt peaceful, if not overflowing with happiness (with the help of some valium, I have to admit), and I’ve tried to convince myself that when it comes down to it, even if we don’t know the exact date, everyone has their final day; it’s a matter of enjoying the moment without getting melancholy about it.

  It’s also true that hope—and the ability to create false hope—is as infinite as our ability to adapt to things; but I’ve gotten that under control, too. I no longer have fantasies about getting a call from the hospital to say there was a mistake in the diagnosis, or that there’s some miraculous new medicine. I’ve gotten over that phase.

  I’d read a lot about death, but I didn’t know anything about it. The only death I’ve ever seen was my paternal grandfather’s. He was a prolific smoker of Gener cigarettes, and he spent three days struggling to breathe, inhaling with incredible difficulty, and his snoring, which alternated with an exhaled whistling noise, made all of us at his bedside extremely anxious. (We had to take turns holding his oxygen mask up to his face, because the rubber straps cut into his skin, and sometimes I wished he would die. One night when we were alone, it occurred to me that I could suffocate him with the pillow, and I’m sure that all of us who took turns with him thought of something like that at some point; it’s tough seeing somebody who there’s absolutely no hope for suffering like that, and we were tired of that lacerating wait. It was so absurd to be waiting there for death, and so natural to want it to happen. On what was to be my last turn, the oxygen mask fell off all of a sudden, and he looked at me with his small, lidless, almost pupiless eyes, clear and penetrating, and said, “This is so long.” For him and for all of us, I thought.) Having gone through that, I couldn’t stand the idea, if it ever came to that, of anybody getting impatient because I was taking too long to die, and you’ve always found my slowness irritating; you’re quicker than me, more determined, livelier than me, and I’m sorry about getting distracted by reflections like this. Sometimes I still can’t stop melancholy from taking ahold of me, and I enjoy giving myself up to the feeling that I’m seeing something for the last time—somebody, you’ll probably know who, once said that it’s as moving seeing things for the last time as it is seeing them for the first time—but at the same time, it’s limiting living with that continual awareness that the end is near, it’s like when you go shopping before going away for a while and you don’t want to leave too many things in the fridge. Right at this moment, I’m thinking about how I’m never going to wear that new cashmere coat in the closet ever again, because it’s for cold weather and I, of course, won’t live to see another winter. I think that my things, all sorts of things—shoes, my watch, books on my bedside table—are starting to take on that worn-down, cold aura that comes with death. Speaking of that coat, I remember the first time I wore it, when we went to the Trueba Cinema. You were cold when we came out, I put it around your shoulders, and as you snuggled into it, you said it was soft. We weren’t very happy. You’ll remember the day if you put it on in front of the mirror, as I’m doing now, and perhaps you’ll feel that cold I’m talking about, the cold that gets into dead people’s clothes and, because of that, makes some people unable to ever wear them. I find it hard to be relaxed about this. Whether you like it or not, you realize in my situation that people are going to pay that special importance you pay to dead people’s words to everything you say; people repeat with reverence and great mystery what the dead person said to them the last time they met on the street, even if what they said was completely trivial, and that’s even more so in this case, in these words written down and left to you as my last words. In letters from people condemned to death, it isn’t the passionate words of commitment to a noble cause or the conviction that a better world awaits us that most moves me, nor is it the words of love and consolation for those closest to them, or even words of forgiveness for those who condemned them to death and are now going to execute them—it’s the practical messages that might seem so irrelevant just before death and that stem from simple, modest stoicism. (To give an example, I remember a letter from a soldier the night before he was going to be shot, reminding whoever he was writing to to pick up his jacket from the dry cleaners.) We’ve already talked about this. We both thought
that in such a situation, you would have to think about something else. What am I thinking about? I’m not especially afraid. Even so, sometimes, in some random situation, when I least expect it, I feel a blow of anxiety, like struggling for air, but it doesn’t last long. And from time to time, I get angry. I sometimes wonder, when I see an old person or somebody who looks bad, why they aren’t the person in my situation. But I don’t let myself think about things like that for long, because they’re unhealthy, they dirty me and don’t do me any good. I feel better—really good, in fact—when I find myself feeling noble things; when it comes down to it, we’re just a bunch of poor wretches who are designed to be good. I’m also impossibly sentimental given my situation, and I start crying at anything. A cloud, flowers, birdsong—as I’ve told you. Suddenly, when I’m doing whatever it is, I realize I want to cry. To let myself cry softly, tears streaming down my cheeks, doing nothing to stop myself, or to sob out loud with my mouth wide open, like children do to show that they’re crying. (This very morning, when you were playing Ravel’s Pavanea, I was about to make a show of myself, I promise you I was, and I had to run to the bathroom to be able to cry as I wanted to.) But I wouldn’t like my words to seem particularly important just because of the situation in which I’m writing them. I have the clear feeling that I’m going to die far from the god of my religion; it’s easier for me not to believe in that frightening god and his threats of eternity. I can assure you that for somebody who had that fear forced on him, it’s a consolation to feel you’re not going anywhere. Another unquestionable fact is that if I had to choose between a forecast death and a sudden one, I’d prefer the former. I know you wouldn’t, and that it irritates you to hear that death is something worth experiencing and things like that—we’ve read a thousand quotes about that—because you think it’s foolish and mystical. You usually say the best thing would be to up and die, just like that, and I’m not so sure. But now, sure that my death is near, I experience some moments with greater intensity, as I’ve told you before, with greater awareness, because I’m more sensitive to some things—happily, you could say—and on the other hand, I pay less attention to some other things, or no attention at all. It’s a pity not to have been able to do that before, but it’s probably impossible without the knowledge my situation brings with it. And that’s not all. Death’s also a relief for somebody like me who’s always been afraid of it, of when it’ll happen—here it is at last—if you have the consolation of having lived, having loved, and having been loved. I’m in debt to you for that. Finally, a forecast death gives you the chance to make practical arrangements that seem more important to you than in other circumstances. (I could write so many silly things now, using the metaphor of Malone’s fingers hardly being able to pick up the worn-down pencil.) So that’s what I’m doing, sorting out practical matters. Not much about my corpse. I used to tell you I wouldn’t even care if you threw it into the trash, and I don’t have much to add to that—whatever’s easiest within the law. The only thing I would like to ask, if I can, is that my body not be put on display at a funeral parlor and for it to be kept instead at the hospital for whatever period of time it has to be, far from sight. I know it shouldn’t matter to me, but, then, our sense of dignity brings out stupid worries like that. I left my will with the notary a long time ago. So the only thing remaining is what to do with my papers. Somebody said—you’re bound to know who—that death opens up the deceased’s secret drawers. I have one in the bookshelf with the Diderot and D’Alambert Encyclopédie, and I’m leaving it open. There isn’t much in it, and what there is isn’t of much interest to anybody else, and I don’t want anyone to get ahold of it. I tried to get rid of it myself, but I felt the same dizziness I did on those dawns when I went out onto the balcony and wondered if I’d be capable of throwing myself off. I wanted to have it all with me until the last moment, and that moment doesn’t arrive until we’re completely dead. Be kind to my memory, and burn all the photos and letters in the orange files. There is one thing, a poem written on a little florist card, which is yours. (I don’t know why I’ve kept it. Why do some people keep their kidney stones and gallstones once they’ve been removed? At last I can look at it without losing my temper. Until recently, every time I felt I was drifting away from you, I would get it out of the drawer in order to confirm, from the anger I would feel on reading “you are more loyal than anybody,” that my wound was still open and, therefore, that I still loved you. Perhaps it’s because of that supposed usefulness that I never gave it back to you, believing that my childish, possessive nature was a measure of my love for you. Now, finally, I know that if that card shows anything, it’s that you’re independent from me, able to lead your own life, nothing more than that. It’s yours, and I’m giving it back to you.) I’ve thrown away things I’ve written. Several short stories, many of them unfinished, sketches for novels, many first chapters of novels later abandoned, diary entries, notes—and my thoughts; don’t laugh—which, I suppose, might provide clues about how I write and a few relevant biographical details. I printed everything out before erasing it, so that I could burn it and allow myself the melancholy ceremony of watching my work burn.