Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  Suddenly she thinks she hears a bang from the upper story, she isn’t sure. She heads to the staircase, tries to go up normally, not wanting to startle Martin if he’s in bed, but she also tries not to make any noise, in case he’s asleep. The bedroom door’s wide open, and inside, because the shutters don’t fit perfectly, rays from the powerful streetlamp down by the riverside come in and mix with the half-darkness, giving enough light for her to see Martin and Harri side by side, both of them dressed, on top of the bedcover. She takes a step backward, revolted by what she’s seen. Perhaps that’s too strong a word, but she can’t think of a better way to say what she’s feeling. Struggling to recover from her fright as she goes back toward the stairs, she tries to work out what’s behind that feeling. She stands still when she hears one of them put a foot on the floorboards. She doesn’t want to run away. She doesn’t want to go down the stairs like some indignant woman who’s been cheated on. So she waits. She has to wait for longer than expected, and that gives her time to figure out why what she saw affected her so much—it was because they were both fully dressed on the bed, shoes and everything, like in the scene described by Simone de Beauvoir when Sartre is lying in the hospital room and she asks the nurses to leave them alone and then lies down and falls asleep beside him until the nurses come back in and cover Sartre’s corpse with a sheet. It’s at the end of La cérémonie des adieux. She realizes, leaning there against the wall, that she’s both loved and hated that book at different times. Harri sticks her head out the door. Only her head comes out of the room, as if she were deciding whether to step into the hallway or not, as if she were afraid of doing so. Finally, she does step out, but she doesn’t move any closer toward Julia. She leans against the wall, her hands behind her back. Julia has the photo of herself as a girl and the poem from her literature workshop friend in her hands. “Oh you, friend of the sun.”

  “It isn’t what it looks like,” says Harri, and even though Julia knows there’s no irony in her words, she finds it funny. It makes her laugh. “How original,” she says. As they walk down the stairs, Harri puts a hand on her shoulder, which she rejects by moving to one side. She’s decided to take her bag and leave in a hurry, but now Harri is holding her arm forcefully. She’s blurting the words out. She came back from Bilbao, completely depressed, and had to talk with somebody, that’s why she came over; the front door was open, she came in and called out, but nobody answered; then she went up to the bedroom and saw him lying still on the bed, as if he were dead, and she thought that the worst had happened, she even put her finger under his nose to check whether he was breathing, and then he opened his mouth to say that he was all right, he was fine, and she looked as if she’d come from being in a much worse situation than him. She lay down beside him, and there they remained, side by side, until they fell asleep. That’s all.

  “Lying on the bed with your shoes on and everything.”

  That’s what Julia says, though she doesn’t know why. She knows it doesn’t make any sense, and Harri looks at her as if she’s crazy. “He’s really doing very badly,” she murmurs after a short pause, in a tone which couldn’t sound more afflicted, and Julia’s heart misses a beat when she realizes she means he’s very sick.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He told me he’s stopped writing and he’s burned all his work. Do you realize what that means?”

  She has both hands on her cheeks, like in Munch’s Scream.

  Julia is about to tell her that Rome could burn as far as she’s concerned, when the writer who’s stopped writing appears at the top of the stairs. He looks as if he’s just woken up, his scarce hair is in a mess, electrified. He asks what’s happening, and then, as if he’s just realized that Julia is there, says, “I didn’t think you were going to come back.” She doesn’t know what to answer. She would pick up the keys and throw them down on the table in anger, but she doesn’t have them on her, she left them in her purse on the dresser along with Zigor’s presents. She still has the photo and the Villa Flores envelope in her hand. Harri touches one of her cheeks with her fingertips and takes a step backward like an automaton. Then she says, “You two have to talk,” and she makes to leave the house. She stays at the door for a long while, looking from one to the other, as if wanting to say something more before she leaves, but in the end, she opens the door and leaves without saying a word.

  Julia would like to do the same thing, but Martin makes a gesture to her, and she obeys, waiting at the bottom of the stairs for him to come down. When he reaches her, he says he didn’t expect her back so soon. She remembers the girl on the train, and the fact that it was the desire to tell Martin what the girl said that brought her back. “You know what?” The smoke has come into the living room, too, and she uses the photo as a fan. He holds his hand out for her to give it to him. Julia hesitates. She takes the Villa Flores envelope in her left hand and holds the photo out to him in her right hand. Martin smiles as he looks at it with concentration. “You’re still the same,” he says. Another pause. “You’ve still got everything that made you attractive then. And all the bad things, too—you’re obstinate and abrupt.” He’s still smiling. And then, “It looks like you’re going to hit somebody with the guitar,” and he laughs out loud. She laughs, too, because she’d just been thinking the same thing. Quietly, she asks him where he got it from, not wanting to remain in silence and preferring a neutral subject. “You look really good,” he says, without paying any attention to her. Julia doesn’t like having her photo taken and seldom smiles in them. But she is smiling in this one, if only slightly. Martin turns the light on to see it better. He continues looking at the photo in silence, but shaking his head, as if noticing something strange in it. “It’s remarkable how you’re still the same girl as you were then,” he says eventually. There’s a flicker of affection in his eyes. You didn’t know me when I was young, Julia says once more. She isn’t comfortable like that and turns away, not knowing where to look, without realizing that he’s looking at the Villa Flores envelope until he points at it with his chin. “That’s yours, and I couldn’t burn it.” The smile on his lips is still playful. Julia knows what’s coming next, she feels a slight throbbing in her ears, pressure on her temples and on the nape of her neck. She doesn’t want to hear him start reciting with emphatic diction “I feel you alive in this springtime you’ve brought back to life with me. Oh you, friend of the sun,” and as if doing so might silence him, she tears the little envelope with the card inside it into two pieces, but she can’t tear it again, so she squeezes the two bits in her hand, hesitating over whether to throw them in his face or not, and he covers his face with both hands in an expression of horror. “But how could you destroy such a wonderful poem?” he says.

  Julia tells him not to start again. She doesn’t know why she throws the pieces of paper into the air rather than putting them in her pocket, and Martin bends over to pick them up carefully.

  They hear the nun’s tin bell ringing—eight rings after the first one, nine altogether, or perhaps ten. Martin is kneeling down and piecing the card together again. “Why does that idiot say ‘you who are more loyal than anybody’ when you were cheating on me?” And he looks genuinely put out. “You should ask him,” she replies sharply. She feels a strong urge to cry, whether from anger or sorrow she does not know. He’s forced her to hate the poor guy who wrote that silly poem. What else could she do? Holding onto the side of the table, he finds it hard to get up; when he does, he takes a few steps toward the window, in which she sees his figure reflected.

  “I wanted to tear it up a thousand times, but I never could.”

  She sees him against a shiny dark-blue background. He talks slowly, as if what he had to say was tiring. “Everything I write is to reach the moment where I get to tear up that card up and embrace you, happy because you’re happy to be with me.” He turns toward Julia, and she takes a step backward, warily. They stand still, facing each other but four steps a
part, until the phone suddenly rings.

  Julia’s glad the call’s put an end to the scene. Then she’s disappointed when she sees him go to pick up.

  It’s one of his sisters. It’s easy for Julia to tell—he spends at least a minute with the receiver to his ear without saying a word, moving nervously in his armchair as he listens to the person on the other end of the line speaking. It’s always like that. Then, seeing him nodding continually, and getting very angry, saying that Ane’s already told him, it’s obvious it’s his other sister, the one in Paris, who’s talking to him about their parents’ quarrel. It’s clear she’s asking him to take measures to sort things out, because he’s protesting, saying things like “What do you want me to do?”; “It’s easy to say that from Paris”; “I’m doing everything I can”; and “I’m tired, too.” He sounds sarcastic, aggressive, and pitiful in turn, but there’s no question that making people feel sorry for him is his forte. Now it’s mostly he who’s talking, as the depressed brother. He repeats the same sort of things at regular intervals—he’s completely exhausted, really tired—silently groaning between lament and lament until he reaches the end of his repertoire, and then, seriously and sadly but slowly and calmly, he says, “I’ve thrown everything I’ve ever written onto the fire.”

  He’s sitting with a leg over one of the chair’s arms, apparently indifferent to Julia’s presence, and she decides to leave. She does up her jacket and straightens her skirt as a way of saying that she’s leaving. She goes back toward the dresser by the door, looking for some sign that his conversation might be about to end, but in vain. She makes another meaningful gesture—taking out the keys and leaving them on top of the television. Finally, the writer who’s just thrown his complete works into the fire raises his open hand to ask her to wait. Ordering her to wait, perhaps. She isn’t sure. He’s looking down at the floor now, both feet on the ground, one hand holding the phone to his ear and the other open above his head. “Yes, I’ve burned it all—absolutely all of it,” he says. He makes a short, emphatic pause between “all” and “absolutely all of it.” For a moment, Julia wonders whether to pick the keys up again and throw them down on the glass table in front of the chair or not. She’s afraid of breaking it. The writer who’s fed all his work into the fire looks at her again as if not understanding what she’s doing. It’s a short look. He stands up straight and lowers his hand onto his chest. “You don’t give me much help,” he says, or moans, rather. And then, furious, “Do you know what I had to do to get that fucking suite at the María Cristina?” And again and again: “Do you know?”; “Do you?”; “Do you have any idea?”

  Julia wonders once more whether to throw the keys down on the glass table. Finally, she leaves them on top of the dresser. She adjusts the bag strap on her shoulder, picks up the plastic bags with the presents in them, and opens the door. She bends down again to get the two travel bags with her things in them and lifts them up quite easily. She doesn’t close the door after her.

  She puts the bags down on the floor near the top of the stairs and runs the rest of the way up to the apartment when she hears the phone ringing. She’s worried that something bad may have happened. She opens the door and rushes to the shelves in the entryway to answer before whoever it is hangs up.

  “It’s me.” What her mother always says when she calls, the same old voice, sad and then cutting, more tired than usual, if that’s possible. “Etxezar’s burned down.” Julia was scared she was going to say that something happened to Zigor; her mother must notice the relief in Julia’s voice when she replies that she knew something like this was bound to happen one day, because she cuts her off: “You don’t seem to care.”

  In fact, she doesn’t care.

  Martin calls her cell phone. She looks at his name until it disappears from the screen, which seems to take forever.

  22

  The gynecologist who’s out of work and out of a salary is woken up by the sound of his wife in the bathroom, or at least it’s she he first hears when he opens his eyes. She has an extensive repertoire, spanning all types of music, but even though she has a good ear, she doesn’t know a single entire song. Today, Maite is what’s accompanying her morning shower. As the day goes by, she’ll go over the same song nonstop, repeating the one line she knows, “Maite, eguzki eder, eguerdi beteko argia”—Maite, beautiful sun, midday light—and humming the rest. He doesn’t find that habit of hers irritating. Quite the opposite—he likes it, because it means she’s in a good mood, although, to tease her, he asks if she can’t put on another record, though it’s usually she herself who complains that she can’t get rid of the tune that’s gotten into her head, blaming the habit—he thinks rightly—on her obsessive personality. He listens out to hear her intake of breath as she turns the cold water on at the end of the shower, which she always does, even if she’s in a hurry. Recently she’s often late, like today. He knows that from the sound of her putting the pots of lotion quickly back onto the glass shelf, and then because she walks to and fro along the hallway with the electric toothbrush, which is a sign that she’s cleaning her teeth as she takes clothes out of the closet or does other tasks, raising the blinds or putting the breakfast things into the dishwasher.

  Abaitua, after hesitating for a moment over whether to get out of bed or wait until she leaves the house, finally decides to make an appearance when Pilar’s movements tell him that she’s about to leave, so they’ll have just enough time to say hello but not enough to talk. He gets out of bed when he hears her heels in the dressing room, throws his bathrobe on, and leaves the room. Pilar sticks her head into the hallway, smiles, and says good morning.

  “How did it go?” She goes back into the bathroom without waiting for his reply, combing her wet hair energetically, leaning her head in the direction of the strokes. “I’m losing a lot of hair.” She shakes her head and combs her fingers backward through her hair. He’s seldom seen her use a hair dryer, and as always, he thinks she looks younger with her hair wet. Perhaps rather androgynous. A drop of perfume behind her ears, at the top of her breasts, and, pulling aside the elastic on her panties, at the top of her thighs, too. Sometimes she says “just in case” or “you never know,” but not today. She looks at him with curiosity when she realizes he’s looking at her. She puts on a gray skirt and is holding a sweater and a jacket over her arm, which, as usual, she’ll put on in the elevator.

  Her cell phone rings, and he watches her open her purse and pour the contents out onto the dining room table—several key rings with a lot of keys on them; wallets, at least two; agendas, at least two; packets of tissues; tubes of lotion; lip balm; and her vibrating phone.

  He doesn’t know exactly who she’s talking to. There’s no doubt it’s a colleague, because of the technical words she’s using to explain her projects for the clinic, but from a certain point onward, he has the impression that she’s talking for him to hear, or at least that she’s making use of her conversation with the unknown person to tell him the information, too. He doesn’t know why he thinks that. Perhaps it’s because she’s talking louder than usual and she stays next to him rather than moving away with the phone, which is what she normally does. Whether he’s right about it or not, thanks to her conversation with her unidentified colleague, he finds out that Urrutikoetxea is creating problems for the project—Abaitua thinks that this information, in particular, is for his benefit—and that she’s hoping to convince him next Thursday or Friday at the meeting they’re going to have in Bilbao. He has to admit he’s a bit envious to see her so fully involved in her work; she has at least two operations that day, although she says what she finds toughest is management work. She says goodbye to the unknown person at the other end by saying that she has to go to her lawyer’s to sort out some papers and that she’s very late.