Sascha Arango: The Truth and Other Lies

Martha had quietly cried out his name when he’d mentioned the baby. Then the sea had poured into the house and swept her away.

Henry got up from the leather sofa, his right foot still asleep. He massaged it until the blood returned to his toes, and looked dazedly through the glass out onto the fields. The sea had vanished.

He hobbled into the kitchen to make himself a ristretto. The damned sea should have carried him away, not her. He was really sorry about what he’d said to Martha, and it was all so completely wrong! Why hadn’t he spoken of respect and gratitude, of admiration and of love, which he felt for her like no other man could? But no, he had torn out her heart like a weed. She’d never get over the pain, that was for certain.

He stood on one leg next to the coffee machine, waiting for the water to get hot. It was clear that the whole thing had to be broken to her more gently; it would be better if he didn’t mention the baby at all; it might drive her clean out of her senses. But if he kept that quiet, why confess to anything at all? Wasn’t everything in fact fine just as it was? The longer Henry pondered, the clearer it became to him that he must spare his wife and tell Betty the whole truth instead. Betty was tough; she’d come to terms with it more easily than Martha. She could start a new life, find a new man for the baby; she was made for survival.

With an elegant creak of the cherrywood floorboards, Martha came down the stairs. She was wearing her silk pajamas and Japanese straw sandals; her dark hair was pinned up with an ebony hair slide. As always, she beamed at Henry when she saw him. Martha hardly made a sound when she walked; she was still as petite and light-footed as ever. In the past years she hadn’t put on a single ounce. For a long time now they had been sleeping and working separately, Martha upstairs, Henry downstairs. She still only ever wrote at night, and slept, as she had always done, until the afternoon. He saw to everything else. They could have had servants, chauffeurs, and gardeners, but Martha wouldn’t tolerate anyone except Henry around her. While he watched the late-night news or sat up until dawn working on his enormous matchstick drilling rig, he would hear her walking round in circles upstairs. Then he would go into the kitchen and make chamomile tea. He would carry the teapot up and put it down outside her door. Sometimes he listened at the door without touching it. Then he went quietly back down again. At some point the typewriter would begin to clatter. The demon inside her had started its dictation.

Henry had never seen his wife writing. Quite possible that her loins turned to marble as she wrote and that snakes flickered their tongues in her hair. He’d never dared to look.

“Henry, we’ve got a marten in the roof.”

“A what?”

“A marten. It’s making gray lines.”

“Gray lines?”

“Gray stripes that turn into long lines.”

“Like squirrels?”

“Longer and parallel.”

That did indeed suggest a marten. If Martha saw short, gray stripes, it normally meant a small rodent; if the stripes were longer and parallel, it was bound to be a larger animal.

Martha was a synesthete from birth. Every smell and every noise had her seeing colors and patterns. Even in school, when she was learning to form her first letters, she saw photisms coloring the words, usually the same shade as the initial letter. She thought it was normal. It wasn’t until she was nine that she realized that not everyone saw these wondrous emanations, which was really rather a shame. She told her mother, and was taken straight to the doctor. The doctor was old-school and color-blind. He prescribed drugs whose sole effect was to make her fat and sluggish. Martha retched up the tablets and never mentioned the colorful apparitions again. It remained her secret until she met Henry.

“Can you come upstairs, please, and have a look?”

Oh, darling, I’m afraid I’m a worthless wretch, Henry wanted to say, not worthy of you at all. I deserve to die — why can’t you release me from my suffering? Take pity on me and see me for who I am at last.

“What do you say to fish for supper tonight?”

“Henry, this animal gives me the creeps.”

“Come here, darling.” He hugged her, kissed her hair. Martha laid her head on his chest, drinking in the scent of his skin.

“You smell a little bit orange today,” she said. “Is it anything serious?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

He couldn’t bring himself to say it. He mumbled something, incomprehensible even to himself, and laughed nervously. When he laughed, Martha saw deep blue spirals leap out of his mouth. No other man in the world laughed pure ultramarine with dancing star-shaped splashes.

Martha kissed Henry on the lips.

“If it’s a woman, keep it to yourself. And now let’s go and look for the marten, shall we?”

She took his hand and pulled him up the stairs behind her. Henry followed her, pleased. So she already knew and wasn’t cross. The way she understood his failings was something he particularly valued in her, and so whenever Henry saw other women he did it discreetly and tactfully. He was often ashamed of himself; he frequently made up his mind to reform. But every time he came home after an affair, he was wreathed in telltale patterns; Martha could read the X-ray images of his guilty conscience. Only in Betty did Martha see a serious threat, not entirely without reason, as we know. And yet the two women had only met once, at a cocktail party in Moreany’s garden.

It had been a remarkably mild evening; the night-flowering plants had opened their calyxes, luring the moths to pollinate. Betty stood at the buffet, her low-cut, backless dress exposing her dimples of Venus; she was poking around with a fork in a bowl of strawberries. “Not her , Henry,” Martha had said quietly, as she caught the gaze of her husband swinging toward Betty’s magnetic dimples like a compass needle. Henry knew at once who Martha was talking about, and that he’d never give Betty up. He promised he’d never see her again. From then on he only ever saw Betty in out-of-the-way places. He bought himself a mobile phone with a prepaid card, and paid for motels and candlelit dinners in cash. All the same it remained a liaison of hasty fondlings, accompanied by a constant sense of sad foreboding.

——

Martha’s room was not big, and was done out in creamy white. She didn’t like rooms with high ceilings; they reminded her of her time in the psychiatric clinic. Her small desk and swivel stool stood under the sloping roof at the dormer; her bed, with its white covers, stood between the dormer and the bathroom door. Henry had really wanted to buy a French château with the first million from Frank Ellis , but Martha thought castles were too big and cold, and she insisted on something more modest. While she was working on the next novel, Henry had discovered the old manor house on the coast, fucked the estate agent, and set about restoring the property straightaway.

Henry looked around Martha’s study, listening. There was a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter. There were no crumpled-up pages lying around; the small wastepaper basket was empty; there were no notes, nothing that suggested rough drafts or corrections. The cataract of words poured out of her brain and straight through the machine onto the paper; not a single word got spilled.

“Can you hear it?”

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Maybe it’s asleep.”

They both listened in silence. Now was the moment, he thought. Now he had to tell her. But his thoughts didn’t turn into words.

“It was a stork on the roof.”

“There aren’t storks at night, Henry.”