Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  More than steering, it looks to him as if she’s clinging onto the wheel with both hands, looking at him without paying any attention to the road for what seems to him like an incredibly long time. Then she looks ahead again and turns the windshield wipers on.

  Abaitua, when she mentioned galactorrhea, thought for a moment that she could be mocking him, thinking of Lynn, but that seems crazy to him. It didn’t remind him at all of Pilar’s mistake.

  The rain’s falling heavily now.

  “Do you really not know why they brought up the hypophyseal tumor?”

  She seems to be talking to herself. From the very beginning, she knew there was something in the air, they were treating her with pity, trying to supress their urge to mention her slipup. And finally they did. After telling their joke about hypophyseal tumors in front of that revolting painting, Urruti squeezed her arm as if to apologize.

  Hadn’t he noticed?

  Abaitua doesn’t answer. In fact, he was quite pleased with the way things went. He thinks of saying that but keeps quiet, even though he finds the silence oppressive. Now he doesn’t know what he finds more irritating, the windshield wipers’ quick movements or the noise they make, and what he sees—they’re in the left-hand lane, driving at full speed as they leave a string of trucks behind them—isn’t soothing, either. He holds onto the door handle and his left foot moves as if to brake. Once more, the seconds take a long time to go by. Moving back into the right-hand lane reassures him a little, and to hide his fear, he asks if she minds if he puts on some music. She just shrugs. He turns the CD on and, wanting to be pleasant, asks if she might not be a bit too suspicious.

  “Suspicious?”

  “Torturing yourself unnecessarily.”

  “I need some distraction / Oh beautiful release.”

  Abaitua feels more and more irritated by her lack of gratitude for him having gone with her to Bilbao and made an effort to behave in a civilized way. He thinks about Lynn. That song was playing there, in her room, when she said “oh my god” in desperation. He thinks that perhaps they were actually laughing at him, and he tells her so. “They may actually have been laughing at me.”

  “And why would they be laughing at you, may I ask?”

  He finds it obvious, but difficult to explain.

  “I don’t know, I am your husband, after all.”

  She repeats the same sentence—“I am your husband, after all”—with distaste, imitating a child’s whining. Her cheeks are pale, her face disfigured by the bluish light shining on it from the dashboard. Abaitua doesn’t know what speed they’re going at, he can’t see from where he’s sitting, and he doesn’t want to move, in case she thinks he’s controlling her—something she could get angry about—but he holds onto the strap above the window again. A sign of distrust she doesn’t miss; she looks at his hand and then at his face. She nods again and says three or four times, though he doesn’t know why, “I am your husband, after all,” now repeating it with more disdain than mockery, or at least that’s what he thinks. It could be sorrow or anger, too. More likely anger, since she presses her foot all the way down on the accelerator even though there’s one truck after another all along the left-hand lane, and when he’s so frightened he finally has to say something to her, she straightens her arms, pushes her body back into the seat, and suddenly brakes, swerving the steering wheel over to the right and taking the car off the road, and they hear the noise of gravel being dragged along for a few yards until they come to a stop. Fortunately, there wasn’t anybody behind them. The engine turns itself off and Pilar rests her head on the steering wheel after saying “I am your husband, after all” once more. She slams her head against it three or four times and makes the horn go off. Now she seems like somebody who’s had an accident. Abaitua remembers that once, when they were driving down from Chamonix, the car in front of them, which had been going very fast, a lot faster than them—from above, they could see the S-curves it was tracing, one after another, as it made its way down the steep hill—hit the trunk of a tree at a bend. When they got there, the driver was sitting in a normal posture with his back on the seat, but when Abaitua put his hand on his shoulder, his head fell forward and made the horn go off, just as Pilar has. He felt his carotid artery, and after stopping the horn, the silence in the valley was absolute and long-lasting. Then the branches of the tree started brushing together, the birds began singing and the cowbells clanging. He’s never felt life escaping in such a palpable way. As he remembers that scene, he crosses his arms, and Pilar’s head is still resting on the steering wheel. They stay like that for a while, until she turns toward him without lifting her head up. Although the hardness and despair that have been in her eyes so often recently are no longer there, her look terrifies him. “Eres un egoísta de mierda,” she says almost sweetly, calling him a self-centered bastard. And she continues, still in Spanish: “Sólo piensas en ti. Que cuando hablen de lo mío pronunciarán tu nombre. La cagada de la mujer de Abaitua.” All you care about is yourself, she’s just said, about your name coming up when people talk about me. Abaitua’s fucked up wife.

  Why isn’t she speaking in Basque?

  He holds onto one of her hands and asks her to calm down. Of course he’s sorry. But Pilar lets go of his hand. Not roughly, but certainly firmly. She carries on with what she was saying, accusing him once more of not minding how much she’s suffering over what happened, not caring about the poor girl who won’t be able to walk again. He hasn’t even asked her who she is. “Sólo te importa que lo mío pueda dañar tu imagen, que te asocien a mi incompetencia, a él, el genio, el honrado, el incomprendido, el que nunca se equivoca,” she says—you only care about what I do when it might affect your own image, when it might make people connect you with my incompetence, you, the genius, the honourable, misunderstood man, the man who never does anything wrong. She punches the steering wheel, though this time without blowing the horn, then lies back in her seat with her arms crossed. Tears flow down her cheeks.

  Cars are driving past them at a close distance, and their noise drowns out the CD. Abaitua takes her hand again to draw her toward him. He didn’t ask her anything because he thought she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “I can’t get that poor girl out of my mind.”

  Pilar’s voice sounds normal now, perhaps a little sharper because she’s trying not to cry. Abaitua opens the door. He’d better drive, they’ll talk about it all when they get home. But she doesn’t pay any attention to him and doesn’t move. “A poor, sweet girl, bright and full of life, condemned forever. My mistake has a body, a face, and gray eyes.”

  “You know what?”

  What could he possibly know? He doesn’t reply, just waits for her to continue.

  “She told me she didn’t want to become the name for my guilt.”

  Her voice breaks as she tries to stifle a sob. That’s what she said to her, she repeats, sounding now like a child who’s been told off—“Eso me dijo.” She says it again and again, until he shakes her arm to get her to be quiet. His heart misses a beat. He wants to know her name.

  “¿Cómo se llama?”

  Pilar keeps quiet, she probably hasn’t even heard him. She looks at him without saying a word, as if trying to understand how her words have affected him, and moved by what she sees, she says once more, “She didn’t want to become the name for my guilt.” As if reciting a line of poetry.

  “¿Cómo se llama?” he asks her name again.

  “Lynn.”

  She apparently feels the need to add that she’s American. She says the name again and spells it.

  He gets out of the car. The rain is coming down hard, almost horizontally because of the rough wind, and the noise of the traffic is horrendous. Cars keep going by and honking their horns, flashing their lights to reproach them for creating such a dangerous situation. He feels like throwing up, he holds onto the barrier at the side of the ro
ad with both hands. Pilar gets out, too. Now she’s the one to ask him what’s wrong. The horns leave a moaning wail behind them. He’s always had trouble vomiting—he can’t relax his esophageal sphincter, and his glottis closes up. Pilar’s warm hand on his forehead helps him. His mother used to help him like that, too. They’re both soaked, more so by the passing trucks that splash them as they speed through the puddles on the road than by the rain itself. The noise is deafening. He feels as if he’s been bled and wonders whether his biochemistry has recovered to the extent that he’ll be able to make it back to the car, or whether he’ll fall down in the mud he’s now stumbling across—his arms held wide open, as if testing the air with his finger—before he gets there. He’s tempted to lie down right there, as if injured in an accident, but Pilar holds him firmly by his arm. “Let’s get out of here before we get killed,” she says, and thanks to her, he manages to take the last steps.

  Pilar looks in the rearview mirror for a chance to get back on the road, and Abaitua doesn’t know whether to admit that he knows Lynn or to say once again that the lunch disagreed with him, the sound of the blinker seeming to force him into making a decision. Although there’s no question that the second option would be the easier of the two, he knows that covering up won’t do him any good, not even in the short term. And in any case, he has to check that this Lynn is actually Lynn. He presses his crossed arms against his belly and puts his head down to show his physical discomfort.

  Pilar looks at him with curiosity. “Do you know her?”

  She doesn’t give him time to answer. He has the impression she’s going to drive off the road again, even though she only brakes for a moment, but it’s enough to annoy the truck driver behind them, who flashes his lights at them. “Where do you know her from?” Lights once more. It occurs to him that the best thing would be for the huge tank truck to run into them and destroy them. A suitable ending for the drama of the surgeon who’s disabled her husband’s lover out of vengeance. Everyone at the hospital must be talking about it, of course, and they’re right—horror films have been based on less frightful scenarios than this. He finds it hard to breathe, and images go through his head like on a carousel, at dizzying speed; and when he eventually calms down, he doesn’t want to think about them again.

  Lynn denying she was taking antidepressants. No tricyclics or anything else, she’d said. And he’d snooped in her bathroom cabinet. He’s astonished to find himself being more irritated about not having taken such a significant sign into account than he is upset at the entire situation.

  “Where do you know her from?”

  He isn’t sure if he’s ever mentioned Lynn to her. From the hospital, he says, she was taking part in a perinatal research project. Yes, he’s told her about that.

  “And you didn’t know?”

  No.

  Pilar starts crying again. Regretting her clumsiness. Abaitua could tell her that it’s not all her fault.

  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

  Donostia-San Sebastián 25 km. He doesn’t want to get there.

  This time, the remote payment system works. Pilar drives slowly after going through the toll; perhaps she doesn’t want to arrive, either. She looks at him from time to time as if to gauge his mood, how angry he is. “Berak ez dit esan ezagutzen zintuenik,” she says—she didn’t tell me she knew you. Why is she speaking in Basque now? That, in fact, is exactly what he’s wondering: Does Lynn know that the surgeon who disabled her is his wife? He thinks she must. But he tells Pilar she probably doesn’t even know that his wife’s a doctor.

  “And how is it that you didn’t know that she was going to have an operation?”

  “I haven’t seen her for a while, she’d finished her work.”

  “But did you two spend a lot of time together?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  Now, with Pilar crying once more, he doesn’t try to comfort her, although he does wonder whether to put a hand on her shoulder. It seems somehow that he shouldn’t, out of respect for Lynn, and because he thinks she deserves to feel guilty. He’d like her to suffer more, to punish her more by confessing his relationship with Lynn. For a moment, he thinks he’s in a nightmare. “You shouldn’t torture yourself,” he whispers to her. He can’t think of anything else to do.

  “Don’t worry about me,” says Pilar, “I’ll get over it.” He doesn’t have any doubts about that. She will get over it. She’ll be introspective for a few days, furiously concentrating on her sudokus, and then she’ll go back to being her old self once more.

  It’s cleared up, and they can see the city lights. Abaitua is ready to overcome his cowardice and face up to what’s happened. He has to see Lynn. He’s amazed by how easily he accepts that. He’ll think about how to go about it when they get home. Not long now.

  But there are several points he has to clear up beforehand: the anatomic pathology results; the scale of the consequences; exactly what her situation is. Talking about the technical side of things seems to calm Pilar down a little. The tumor was benign, like most pituitary tumors. The prognosis is still unclear. However, there’s nothing they can do any more. She’s going to need specialist rehabilitation. They suggested taking care of her at the clinic until she was well enough to go back to the States, but the person who was with her—an older, unpleasant woman, Pilar says when he asks—requested a voluntary discharge. She hasn’t seen her since.

  They’ve been going along for a while now in parallel to another car with a girl of two or three waving at them from a car seat, and he has to wave back, even though it makes him feel pretty ridiculous. They’ll soon be out of sight of her, because the exit for Ondarreta is just ahead.

  The moment’s come for him to decide how to visit Lynn.

  They don’t take the Ondarreta exit. Pilar says she has to go by the clinic, she’ll get back home in the small car, which she left there the night before.

  The house on the green hill. It really does look like a witch’s house. Some of the windows facing the road are lit up. They cross the little bridge over the railway line and turn left. Then left again, flanked by hydrangeas on the private land to either side. They go into the parking lot, and Pilar turns the car around to leave it facing the exit, so that he doesn’t have to do any manoeuvring. She doesn’t turn the engine off. She takes off the jewelry she was wearing to look elegant in Bilbao and puts it in her bag; the earrings give her some trouble. She says she’s going to visit a patient—“Unless he’s fled in terror.” Her smile is defenseless, shows immense sadness. She puts a hand on his knee but doesn’t move over to give him a kiss. She doesn’t know how long she’s going to be, they’ll see each other at home.

  Abaitua, after driving about three hundred feet, stops the car near the dumpsters. He walks back the way he’s come and reaches the bridge once again. Now he sees the bathroom and kitchen windows from between the reeds, and when he gets past the bend, sees light in the short gallery leading into the living room. He decides to call, but his heart beats hard once the phone’s against his ear and he’s waiting for the call to go through; he’d rather she not pick up.

  “Is it you? Is it really you?”

  Her voice is happy, and she doesn’t let him speak. “How are you? Where are you?” She wasn’t expecting him to call her. When he says he’s across the street from the house and he’d like to come up to see her, she says that if she’d known, she’d have made an appointment at the hairdresser’s, but he should come right away, someone will come down to open the door for him.

  “Someone will come down to open the door for you”—the first real, inescapable confirmation of her tragedy.

  As he goes up the slope, he sees the light in the gallery once more, but it’s faint, probably a reflection of the light coming from the living room. The creak of the iron gate, which he told Lynn more than once he would happily oil, but she said it was a sign of elegance, the sound an elegant i
ron gate should make. The sound of his steps on the gravel, which used to worry him so many nights.

  He hears somebody coming down the wooden stairs—rather fast steps to be those of an elderly woman—and he wonders who it is. While he waits, he realizes that his pants, like his shoes, are covered in mud.

  The writer doesn’t greet him warmly. It’s the first time he doesn’t mind the idea of Martin opening the door; his relationship with Lynn being out in the open no longer matters. The writer looks him up and down, particularly down when he sees the state of Abaitua’s pants and shoes. Then he goes up the spiral staircase incredibly fast—he seems to be used to it—as if wanting to show off that he’s fit, and Abaitua finds it hard to keep up with him. On the way up, Martin tells him that Lynn has suffered a lot and shouldn’t be allowed to tire herself out, just as if he were a doctor giving a visitor permission to go into the patient’s room. Max is waiting for him on the threshold as if he were on the edge of an abyss. He calls to it from the last turn on the stairs, but though it seems to want to go up to him, it doesn’t, and finally, it hides behind the door. It seems the cat doesn’t trust the writer, and once Abaitua goes in, it lies at his feet asking to be petted. It starts purring as soon as he touches it. Martin waits in the entryway, jealous at the welcome the cat’s given him, he thinks.

  Lynn’s voice: “Come on, Max, don’t be obscene.”

  He has to walk past a free-standing drying rack—it’s foldaway and light, the legs forming an X-shape, and it has underwear drying on it; it’s the sort of private sight that’s allowed in houses with children and disabled people—in order to get to the living room. There isn’t much light, and what there is comes from the spotlights on the bookshelves, which are angled down almost as far as the floor. Lynn is lying on the sofa with her striped pashmina shawl on top of her. “Hi.” She sits up without any apparent effort. That smile that completely wrinkles her face. “It’s wonderful to see you.” She holds her arms out to him. The right one more than the left one. She can hardly lift her left arm. He takes a step forward, stands between the writer and the girl. Everything is just the same, the furniture, the paintings, the lily with the blue phallic head in front of him, the decorative objects, and even so, he thinks something’s changed. There’s a glass of water and a box of medicine—Boehringer brand, though what it is specifically he can’t see—on the art deco tray sitting on the triangular table, and when he goes forward to politely give her two kisses, he almost knocks the tray over. “It’s wonderful to see you,” she says again. He doesn’t know where to begin, the writer being there is making him feel quite inhibited, but above all, it’s because he’s not sure his voice will come out. He manages to say that he’s just heard, and obeying the gesture she makes with her right hand, he sits down next to her.