Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  She puts her cell phone into her bag and then pushes everything spread out on the table in with her free hand. She almost dumps in a bunch of ornamental amber grapes, too. Then she looks at him for a while, as if wanting to see what he’s made of her conversation, and Abaitua’s only reaction is to put his hands on his hips and look as if he’s in pain. It isn’t completely false, but he certainly exaggerates it. He’s still feeling the slight spasms he got on his last fishing trip with Kepa. He says, as he tightens the belt on his bathrobe, that he doesn’t have many more sailing miles in him, and he goes back to the room that was once both of theirs and is now just his, sorry he didn’t stay until Pilar left. “Is it as painful as all that?” She follows him into the room, grabs his shoulder from behind, and gently pushes him onto the bed. He protests, it’s nothing, he’ll get over it, but she tells him to let her take a look at it—“I’m a doctor.” She makes him lie face down and then sits on top of him. Because her skirt is narrow, she has to roll it up almost to her waist. He would prefer to extract himself from that intimate situation and makes a movement to get away, says it’s nothing and then, once more, that he’ll get over it, but finally he lets her, and he feels the relief that the heat and movement of her hands bring his kidneys. He doesn’t find the situation easy, but there’s no sign that it’s the same for Pilar. She sings today’s song in a low voice as she massages him in a completely natural way. She’s skillful with her hands. Abaitua gives in and tries to think of something to say, but nothing comes to mind. More precisely, he doesn’t think it appropriate to say any old thing, and he doesn’t think it’s the best time to get into a deep conversation, either.

  He’s tempted to say that he’ll go to Bilbao with her to try to convince Urrutikoetxea, who owes him a lot of favors. But why doesn’t she ask him herself?

  Then the phone rings, and she gets off him quickly to answer it. Now it’s obvious they’re calling her from the clinic. It isn’t hard for him to work out that Orl and some other colleagues have canceled several scheduled operations and that her brother-in-law’s walked out of the operating theater with the patient still waiting to be anesthetised and half the team standing there. They don’t know what to do. Pilar shouts in anger. She’s leaving home right now, she’ll be right there, and nobody should leave. Then she calls her lawyer and quickly cancels their meeting. From the door, still smiling, she turns back to the suspended doctor, who’s lying on the bed, and says, “There, you see.”

  After Pilar says “there, you see” and closes the door, he feels guilty about not having anything to do.

  At one time, he used to enjoy being alone at home. He’s always dreamed about having time to listen to the pile of un-listened-to records, to read the books he’s long wanted to read once and for all, or, quite simply, to laze around, and now, now that he has the time, he feels like an adolescent on a Sunday afternoon. He can’t deny that he reads less than he used to when he was working, and he doesn’t listen to more music, either. The more time you have, the more time you waste, and wasting time makes him feel bad. A consequence of his upbringing. His mother could never stand him not doing anything. “Zorria baino alferragoa”—lazier than a flea, as the Basque saying for some reason goes—that might be the sentence she most used to repeat to him.

  He tries to read a paper about the ethics of Cesarean sections. Should the increasing demand for the operation be given into? Why is it performed more in private hospitals than in public ones? Is it true that doctors, having lost the ability to carry out other fairly simple procedures, are performing Cesarean sections in an increasingly uncritical fashion? The rate of use for the operation has increased ten-fold since he’s been working at the hospital. He finds the article’s English difficult. He finds some authors easy to read in English and others difficult, but he doesn’t know why. Sometimes he’d show Lynn the difficult texts, and it was a comfort that she said they were tough for her, too. He remembers she told him they must have been written in some sort of dense Scottish.

  He remembers Lynn less than he thought he would, fortunately.

  “The core tenants that animate almost all ethical conversations in obstetrics are autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice.”

  The toast getting burned isn’t a good sign.

  In the shower, he decides that he’ll tell Pilar he wants to go with her to Bilbao. He’d really like her to ask him to come along, to humbly admit that she could do with his help because of the influence he has over Urrutikoetxea, but he knows she can’t ask him, and so he’ll have to be the one to say he wants to go, saying he hasn’t seen his friend for a long time. What’s more, he’s determined to behave in an agreeable way in Bilbao, as far as possible, to be cheerful and good company; he recognizes that normally, when they do something she wants to do, he can’t resist responding like a spoiled child, showing that he’s accepted in order to do her a favor, and the result is usually harmful, because he drives Pilar up the wall by being restless and pensive and looking bored.

  Those don’t come if you don’t feel like its, I don’t minds, and don’t complain later ons they exchanged when the plan was to spend the day in Biarritz, and that brusque you could have said you didn’t want to come and the uncomfortable silence that followed it at Miremonte, surrounded by old ladies, many of whom had poodles on their laps, were similar to his reaction that time she agreed to go fishing with him and he, expecting her to make that subtle gesture of bitterness at the side of her mouth, at her very first word about the boat rocking quite a lot, turned the bow back toward the port and put the engine on full speed to get back as quickly as possible. Neither of them has been generous enough, if it’s a matter of generosity, when it comes to feeling happy while sharing in what the other one likes—he less so than Pilar, he admits. To being happy making each other happy, happy just to be spending time with each other, as Lynn would have been.

  He gets a call from the hospital, he has to go in to sign some documents. The on-duty secretary is very kind—everyone’s asked after him and wants him back. It may be arrogant of him, but Abaitua thinks she’s telling the truth. He, too, is counting the days until he can go back to work, and that, at least, is true. He can’t wait to get back to the hospital, because curing people is what he does best, he’s proud of his clinical eye and glad to pass his knowledge on to the residents. (Though it’s also true, if he looks at himself more critically, that he gets quite puffed up when he shows off that knowledge.)

  Many people welcome him at the entrance; it takes him almost half an hour to get to the office, doctors and nurses keep on stopping him and saying they’re behind him. They almost all say the same thing: you’ve been sanctioned while those incompetent, psychopathic killers—and many other names, besides—are free to do whatever they want. He knows, though, that nobody’s protested publicly. Likewise, he suspects that they’re also looking at him with curiosity and mistrust. And even some ill will. But he doesn’t want to be paranoid—it’s obvious people are on his side. Even the supervisor from his mother’s hometown is affectionate when she greets him in her Otzeta Basque, offering him a coffee that’s “better than that muck you get out of the machine.” Soon there’s a tight circle of nurses around him telling him the awful things Arrese’s been doing, and of course, they also tell him about the child with choanal atresia—he’s finally been operated on, but he’s been left a complete vegetable. He tells them he doesn’t want any of the managers to come across them talking with him, given his situation, in order to get away from them.

  He decides to go the long way around to the secretary’s office, in order not to pass by the library, where he could bump into Lynn if she’s there, and on the way, he has to stop all the time to listen to the same words of criticism and support he’s just heard. The biggest novelty is that the secretary, as soon as she sees him, jumps up from her desk in a way that’s surprising for somebody of her weight and gives him two kisses. She looks very upset and even cries a
little as she gives him his correspondence and the documents he has to sign, one of which is a sworn declaration not to make use of any clinical records. They must want to prevent him from looking into any suspicious clinical records so that he can’t use them in any sort of suit against them.

  On his way out, he hears somebody calling him. It’s the fat resident running toward him. “Qué tal”—how are you—he says as a greeting, Abaitua says what he’s told everyone else—he’s enjoying his obligatory vacation—and the resident asks him if he knows anything about Lynn. He’s more irritated than surprised to hear the question and almost asks how he should know but instead replies he doesn’t know anything, he hasn’t seen her for weeks. Apparently the resident doesn’t know anything, either. She hasn’t come to the hospital for a week, and then he keeps quiet, waiting for some explanation, with those wide-open eyes that make him look as though his tie’s choking him.

  He doesn’t know anything, either, he repeats.

  Abaitua notices Jaime Zabaleta coming out of the elevator behind the resident’s huge body and takes advantage of his appearance to get away, raising up a hand to make himself seen. But he realizes he’s gone from the frying pan into the fire when Zabaleta says, “What have you gone and done?” He’s always ready to get a dig in, and he’s always up on the latest. “You’ve been a naughty boy.” It’s hard to know whether he’s smiling or whether his teeth just don’t fit in his mouth. Then Zabaleta seems to realize that Abaitua isn’t in the mood for jokes and starts grumbling to him about people bringing dishonor upon the profession and how useless they are compared with his, Abaitua’s, professional behaviour and skill. Just like everybody else. Bored of the subject, he moves Zabaleta toward the exit while listening to him praising his professional standards and criticizing the terrible things that have been done to him, until the last thing he says stops Abaitua in his tracks: “And on top of it, they’re saying you were drunk.” Now it’s clear that he is smiling, as he watches the effect his words have had.

  “Didn’t you know?”

  He decides to lie. He knows, but he doesn’t care what they say.

  They reach the parking lot. Abaitua’s amazed he isn’t accompanied by his usual bodyguards and asks him if he’s gotten rid of them, to change the subject. He has. He’s fed up of the limitations their constant presence puts on his life, and bearing in mind how little ETA is doing these days, he’s decided to be free of them. “Quote-unquote free,” he says, wiggling his index and middle fingers in the air and showing off his large, solid teeth once more. Even so, he says, even though there isn’t much of a risk, you’re still always afraid.

  “You k now?”

  Of course he does; even without being a significant person himself, he can’t help looking under his car. He says yes, of course he understands.

  They’re standing next to his white Volvo. Zabaleta talks to him about politics, says he thinks the end of the violence is near. Some people want to turn the page as if nothing’s happened, but some of the victims don’t want to forget or accept any type of concessions. Abaitua doesn’t pay much attention to him. He nods from time to time, unable to think of anything but the accusation that he turned up drunk at the hospital.

  Abaitua opens his car door. He’s curious about the last sentence he heard, but since he’s lost track of what Zabaleta’s been saying, he doesn’t dare ask him to clarify, not wanting him to realize that he hasn’t been listening. He just nods to show that he agrees and asks Zabaleta if he wants a lift.

  Fortunately, he brought his own car.

  He looks through the envelopes the secretary gave him before turning on the ignition. Only one of them draws his attention, because it’s hard to the touch, it could be a CD case. He opens it and finds it is a CD—an album by Sarah McLachlan, Surfacing. There’s another envelope with it, the size of half a sheet of paper. On the sleeve, the singer’s eyes are closed, her face is almost in profile, somewhat to one side, one elbow resting on the back of the chair she’s sitting on the wrong way around, that same forearm vertical, and the other one meeting it at ninety degrees, her head fitting perfectly into the U shape made by her arms, sepia on a black background; he thinks it reminds him of a well-known painting, but can’t think what it is. Her name and the title—Sara McLachlan, Surfacing—are hand-written in that distinctively US script, which must be what they’re taught at school and which is how Lynn writes, too. He’s never seen the record before, but he has heard it. He gets the leaflet out of the case. It doesn’t have the lyrics in it; there’s a picture on each page and, above each one, the name of a song written in the same handwriting as on the sleeve, and the credits below. There are ten songs and, so, ten pictures. The seventh is titled Angel, and there’s a naked man in the picture for it; he’s well muscled and reminds Abaitua a little of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, but with only two arms and two legs, his legs spread a little apart and his arms hanging down, a little away from his body. He has a bird’s head and small wings, like a butterfly’s. He puts the CD on. Then he fingers the envelope, wondering whether to open it or not. He folds it and puts it in his inside jacket pocket.

  He remembers Lynn’s enormous disappointment when she found out that the Bordeaux Gloria Victis angel’s wings were pointing down in his memory, and how irritated and astonished he was that she, being such a rational person, could think such an insignificant thing so important; it was as if he’d told her she had only two months left to live. Although the truth is that since then, he can’t believe he had any doubts about the wings. The normal, expectable thing was that they’d be open—they couldn’t be any other way.

  In the arms of the Angel / Fly away from here / From this dark, cold hotel room.

  There were some moments when he thought that Lynn would be able to hold onto him, that she’d be able to get him away from Pilar. But he didn’t feel capable of matching her level of love, and balance is necessary in relationships of love. He would have liked to be able to talk about that with Lynn. When she asked him if he still loved Pilar, he wasn’t sure he could say he did. He wasn’t at all sure. He’s amazed not to feel pain as he thinks of Lynn. An uncomfortable but bearable feeling of guilt, no more than that.

  When he sees the clinic’s large slate roof, he realizes he’s driving along the traffic-less old road to Martutene.

  He crosses the bridge over the railway line slowly, goes past the train stop, and takes the road in the direction of Donostia. After around a hundred yards, after parking outside a block of apartments, he walks back to the train stop and goes up the little slope to the house. Once again, there’s a bunch of shriveled flowers marking the spot where several construction workers were killed by a bomb going off, and he recalls how in many different European cities he’s seen bunches of withered flowers tied in ribbons with the national colors at the feet of statues depicting generals on horseback and unknown soldiers.

  All the blinds in the house are down, so he doesn’t have to be careful. She told him she was going to spend a few days away, or a few weeks, perhaps even a few months, he doesn’t remember. As if it all happened at long time ago. He ventures to go up to the iron gate. Nobody comes out to the garden. Two tabby cats are eating out of the same dish. For a moment he thinks he notices Lynn’s presence, but it turns out it’s just the branches moving on some bushes. He also hears a woman’s voice, clear but distant; it could be Julia—“Do you think that’s fair?” He moves away just in case, leaving the iron gate to his left now as he walks back the other way. A girl riding a bicycle at full speed makes him stand back from the road. She’s wearing a helmet and a cyclist’s jersey. He likes women on bikes, but on city bikes, with books and flowers in the basket at the front, their skirts and hair flowing in the wind, like the women he saw in Amsterdam and that Baroja described in some book or other. He’d been going to give Lynn one but didn’t, afraid she might not have any use for it. She told him she wasn’t going to buy one, because it was no good for
going up the slope to the hospital. He admits he has that petite bourgeois worry about wanting to get use out of things, that fear of spending money to no effect; it’s something he notices more as he grows older. He’s not afraid of spending money, but he does worry about spending it badly, and he says he finds it painful to see money being misused. He doesn’t think it’s miserliness. What’s more, as well as finding it difficult to go into establishments other than bookshops, music stores, and eateries—and he always finds it very hard to choose anything—there’s another consideration, as well, which he’s frightened of: he’d hate to turn out to be an old man forcing his young lover to accept presents. Now he regrets never having given her anything, some beautiful object she could remember him by. He’s often stood in front of the window at Munoa, the jeweler’s, but never dared to go in, wondering how to ask for what he wants. “A jewel for a young woman.”

  He also regrets never having taken her out to watch the sunset from the island. Not going to Urgull first thing in the morning. Walking across Ulia and down to San Pedro, crossing over to Donibane in the boat and having lunch at Casa Cámara. And having dinner at Arzak, so that Juan Mari could have told her, as he does everybody, that he used to feed his grade reports from the Sarasua Academy to the donkey that was kept tied up down by the coal cellar. He would have liked to teach her how to make kokotxas. To go back to Bordeaux, and to the dunes at Pilat.

  He’s afraid the day may come when he can’t bear missing her. He’s afraid he’ll start missing her after it’s too late, when she’s far away, with some other man, forever. He sees the house’s western façade from the little reedbed, the side the kitchen and bathroom are on. The white bathroom, with its old-fashioned fittings. Its shiny white walls with their hexagonal tiles. Copper faucets. The large freestanding bathtub set on what look like the claws of some large animal. Tubes of lotion with the Norwegian flag on them. Lynn sitting on the toilet like Rodin’s thinker, her panties stretched between her knees. Telling him she’ll have to overcome her shy bladder. Her pashmina scarf wrapped around her head like a virgin, holding one of her breasts in one hand and squeezing a drop of milk out of the nipple with the other.