Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (50 page)

Now the turn of their actual business had come. “Skip it. Does not deserve mention; rubbish,” said Berti, while Gordon had said: “I’ll tell you later; perhaps some other day.” This comment had caused a joyful but wry expression on him. It was a joy that resulted from the fact that they had failed to share what they had been going through, about their discontentment with their lifestyles. No yarn was being spun boastfully of one’s adventures, as is normally the case with a person returning home from a long journey. Both had already made their choices in their respective countries; both had their secrets which they could not transport to their past. Berti felt as if he had arrived at a small oasis in a vast desert. He was not in a position to feel that there were diverse reasons for not divulging their experiences. We saw what we came to see which threw a lifeline to our past. Behind his outer features, Gordon undoubtedly concealed a bitterness. I saw before me an individual who had been compelled to endure, with the patience of a sage, a completely different lifestyle than the one he professed. Such a person could not be left out of the frame of this story. Our glances had met silently on a few occasions. Both of us had tried to make the other feel that our origins had been marred by differing solitudes. What I witnessed that evening would remain fixed in my mind thereafter, despite the fact that my original intention had been to remain as a mere spectator. There were times when wishes, the realms of fantasy created by wishes, to be precise, yielded their place to certain obligations and servitudes. This leads me to brood once more on the meaning that fate has left to me. I like to consider what I have been going through as fatality. In this story I also had an ineluctable fate. Within the framework of those intimate associations, I would quite possibly be bound to remain as a stranger to my fate and the words spoken. Regardless of the things bound to remain a mystery to me, I know for a fact that the place I was being motioned toward was exactly the spot where I would feel sure to discover men in their true garb, stripped of their clothing. The venue that Gordon invited me to was such a place; a place wherein men would appear translucent; a vantage point from which I could have a better view of my despair and my efforts to try to transform myself into other personages figuring in new stories; in a nutshell, of my own nakedness. Berti had asked to be excused as he was going to answer the call of nature. A pair of heroes who hardly knew each other until a short time before, who knew that they would never meet again, but who were convinced that the chance to was always there, had remained in their respective shells. Could we have benefited from the opportunity to deliver a part of ourselves to the other? I, on my part, would turn this little opportunity to good account by re-living Marcellina’s story—having learned the truth, which would take me to a completely different place. I wondered if the future I had acquired in the face of this truth was a more tangible one. Despite all those years that had gone by in the meantime, I was in no position to give a proper answer to this question. A suspicion was gnawing at my heart. When I reconsider what I have come by in the meantime and the words that force themselves to be given utterance, I have the impression that certain people must have committed an error, a fallacy of judgment. Whose error could this be, whose truth, whose reality? I’m aware that such questions would lead to further inquiry unless they were answered first. Had these been the impediments that had hindered the merging of stories because of the similarities of which I thought I was in a position to explain as I had become capable of deciphering the clues concealed? Gordon had asked me if I knew Marcellina. “Only to the extent that she would provide enough material for a long story which would entail suspicions, interrogations, and introspection,” had been my answer. “Well,” he retorted, “So far, so good. Time is pressing. Therefore let me tell you something of crucial importance regarding her. I feel that what I know must be communicated to someone who knows Berti well. I know Berti; since you’ve come together, he must have trusted you,” he said. I had caught a glimpse of another aspect of Gordon’s furtive looks. He must be trying to detect the identity of this new acquaintance to the best of his ability. It seemed to me that he had been expecting to hear me utter a sentence, a little sentence that would reveal that identity. But I had preferred to remain silent and express what I felt through my glances. I believe I had apprehensions about things that seemed to me both indefinable and unidentifiable . . . This was understandable. Reticence sometimes gives a person the possibility to have access to things which have to do with other people. In the meantime I had chosen my place. Both of us seemed to have trained ourselves against each other’s games, so much as time allowed. Beyond that it was his domain, exclusively his. This soliloquy had the nature of those long monologues we usually come across in fiction. The timespan was his exclusive possession. The past returned with the last person I expected to see. “You must give me your word that what I’m going to tell you now shall not be communicated to Berti. Can I rely on you?” Gordon said. I had learned what attitude I should adopt in the face of such questions from books—the attitude of a confidant, of an author. I knew how. I had tried to give that pledge through my looks. My position required that I give that pledge in some way or other. “The thing that he never realized, strange to say, was the fact that Marcellina had assumed the guise of a person quite different from the generally accepted image of his lover, of a woman who for most of us is an extremely original woman of the world. This woman, her countenance to be precise, was according to some the very image of the devil, while according to others it was the embodiment of revolt, and still for others a drift. If we associate in our mind our restricted sphere of action and our ignorance of life’s tribulations, she was a woman who had taught us how to live off the fat of the land in the face of prohibitions . . . She was a professional prostitute! You didn’t expect this, did you? To be frank, this had been a surprise for us all, though we tried to preserve the established order by striving to conceal the secret
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. When the time came we saw the lay of the land only after all the tricks had been performed . . . after experiencing the separations. Well life runs away with such dirty jokes. This woman who had inspired each of us with her different methods of observation and self-concealment had for some reason or another chosen Cambridge over so many capital cities. Her assertion was that she wanted to study there. Could this be one of the lies she had concocted to be able to live till eternity, as she put it, in that city? Could it be that she had told whopping great lies to other people in other cities? This we shall never know. All that I can say is that the story she told had seemed plausible and compelling to us. We had lent credence to it and we believed that we could find an important place for it in the future we had been planning. We couldn’t possibly know what the future would bring. Marcellina had cut a poor figure in our story; she appeared to be from humble origins. She had said that she had made a covenant with the devil in order to stand the test of time in the world of the rich. She tried to abide by the covenant with a deep-seated resentment that was not without a sense of revolt, in the garb of an impudent individual who felt no shame for what she had done. ‘This is my vindication, my vow of vengeance on what has been given to me and what has been withheld from me, on the gifts presented and kept from me. This was my gradual resurrection in a different body to match my gradual dying,’ she once said. Her penetrating looks bewitched me. It was as though I was sleeping with a new woman each time we had sex. To have sex with her was an ecstatic experience. It would take years before I learned that she had caused the same rapture for many other individuals. The game had long been played. Each one of us thought that he had been the only privileged subject that had tasted this delight; each one of us had had his part to play. There were four of us in fact; four comrades that fate had brought together only to disperse them afterwards as quickly as they gathered. We were thoroughly and closely interconnected, interrelated and interwoven, and were in the immediate position to tell each other our private relationships. To believe in the veracity of this proximity was essential for us. Yet, we had kept Marcellina off the record and said nothing about her to each other. Why had we acted in this way? It may have been due to that strange blissful state, not without a bit of regret, of our prohibited escapades. This was a kind of veiled fight for superiority. But then we had to relate to each other our respective experiences when Marcellina had left Cambridge for an unknown corner of London. The four of us had drained bumpers till we became dead drunk. Berti had gone back home. We knew that he would never return; at least we sensed it. I had told my friends that I wanted to make a confession and disclosed my affair with Marcellina. My revelation was succeeded by the revelations of the others. All of us had had some sort of an affair with her, each of which differed enormously. I don’t think I have to tell about these affairs since you are not acquainted with them. We must own that every one of them gave voice to a different fantasy. That night we had raised our glasses to that woman who had seemed to us unparalleled. I said we were dead drunk; but we were not dead, as an important part of our life had lingered in her. She was peerless. It may seem to you somewhat unbelievable but I ran into her after many years at a reception at the Argentine embassy. I often used to attend such receptions since my function at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded it of me. She appeared to be even more beautiful and was the focus of everybody’s attention. I didn’t mince words and paid her the compliment she deserved, to which she responded with a wry smile. ‘Life is full of unexpected events and meetings, isn’t it?’ ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I think we were prepared for this, from the very start.’ She gave another smile. Her continuously radiant countenance looked just as she wished it to. I suddenly realized that she had consumed a great quantity of alcohol. ‘However, I cannot say when we will speak again,’ she added. I was silent. She may have waited for an answer from me. But the fact was that I had nothing to say at the time. Then she asked about Berti; she knew our intimacy. I told her that we corresponded every once in a while, but that it had been years since I had last seen him. To sooth her cracking voice, she took another sip from her drink. ‘Good old boy! Gawky youth!’ she remarked, then continued: ‘Someone unaware of the extent of his innocence.’

“It appeared that we both missed him. Both of us seemed to feel uneasy for having been incapable of acknowledging this. Yet, our yearning for him was evident. We wanted to hug him, each of us having different intentions in mind. Now it occurs to me to think that Marcellina was in search for the child she had lost in that relationship when she said that he had been ‘a good old boy.’ It was a fact; she had lost a child when she had severed her relationship with Berti. Children undoubtedly differed among themselves, having many diverse characteristics and features; but one could not deny the fact that all of them had one common trait; namely, being children. Marcellina’s affair with Berti was quite unlike those experienced by the rest of us. Her intention had been, I think, to undertake the lengthy process of ripening that adolescent into a man, shouldering the adversity that accompanied it. This relationship seemed to contain a beauty fed by deceptions and self-delusions, a beauty deserving of exploration, discovery, and definition . . . to be able to live one’s fantasies, even for a brief period of time. To my mind, this behavior displayed a humane aspect of the woman who had accepted the progress of evil as a fatality deserving of respect. Berti had turned a blind eye to what happened outside himself, he failed to see the others; he didn’t even try. He had raised a wall of bliss around his experiences with Marcellina. This wall protected her against outside assailants; it imprisoned them and barred access to them. This may have scared me off trying to find out the truth, despite the fact that we had had the opportunity to talk over every vital problem that life presented to us. I don’t regret it, however. I could not possibly deny him this delusion, whatever the consequences. Marcellina must have thought like me, giving fantasy its due. There was something beyond love in their relationship. Otherwise this feeling could not have lasted for so long, challenging so many storms that raged in the meantime. This conviction may have contributed to my keeping this secret for so many years. Now I feel compelled to share my experiences. I can put an end to my story at this point. However, before I do, let me touch on a point which may have aroused your curiosity. No, I did not see Marcellina after that night. Long after, I thought I had felt her presence in Buenos Aires where I happened to be on duty. She had apparently broken with that senior officer with whom she had been sharing her life, and lived all alone in a small modest apartment, while a close watch was kept over her. That was all I could learn. She had become unattainable to me. I had no other choice but to acknowledge this fact. I wondered if she occasionally dreamt of the days she and Berti had spent together. Life was a stage play that gained meaning through unexpected developments and funny jokes. However, certain actors, for one reason or another, despite all these jokes and the fact that the play was drawn-out, never met again. If this was the joke, I must say it fell a bit flat. If we were a little more daring or willing, perhaps we could provide an answer for such questions. As a matter of fact, we were not simply the actors of the play but also its author. We wrote our own plays piecemeal in others. Some of us got older quicker in this gamesmanship through losses, while those who succeeded remained in a more childlike state. This was, I think, the essential difference among us. As I keep on brooding over these things now, it occurs to me that Marcellina, who must now be leading a completely different life in Buenos Aires in the company of new acquaintances, is most likely feeling nostalgic about her past life in Cambridge. This scene of the play to which we are the spectators seems to meet all expectations. I guess we’ll no longer come across each other in the coming scenes. Under the circumstances, the penning of the play will quite probably be carried on by us, as before, in our respective corners; each one of us writing it for his immediate neighbor, in his own words, seeing to it that what he writes with close mutual empathy is not articulated. However, you have also been involved in this now; you are one of the bearers of this secret. You’re not going to communicate this to Berti. He is still convinced that he happens to be the bearer of an immaculate soul; uncorrupted by life. In truth, this may be. After all . . . ” Suddenly Berti had come back, interrupting our conversation at the very moment when I was going to be entrusted with another secret. Gordon had his head screwed on in the right way. Conscious of the changed atmosphere, he had altered the course of our discussion. He knew well how to steer the conversation away. “And London is no longer the same London. I believe she pays the price for her atrocities in the colonies. We are but the children or grandchildren of those colonialists; this is unfair, is it not?” Berti had cut in and added: “He is my chum all right, but a bloody leftist all the same; beware of expressing your points of view so openly.” This comment had made us laugh; we had forced ourselves to laugh, in fact. What we had laughed at was the diversity of people acting in a variety of ways, in the face of the range of the sentiments nestled in human beings. This had not restrained us from raising our glasses by proposing a toast to the cads, to those dirty leftists. A few minutes silence had followed. I could openly assert the reason for my muteness; I wonder if they could do the same. Could they openly declare in which photographs they still lingered, could they openly say which photographs had accompanied their upbringing? I may provide an answer for this question when I succeed in penetrating certain dark corners of this story. Gordon had broken the silence. “You haven’t been late enough,” he said. He stared at me with a smile like a teacher who had caught his student’s indulgence. “Your friend and I had a chat. To be precise, he has been the one who was kind enough to patiently listen to me. However our long talk couldn’t possibly be squeezed in during the time you were absent. In other words, the writer who would wish to commit it to paper would have a hard time of it,” he added. It seemed as though Gordon knew beforehand that a conversation destined to be put into black and white would change its color under the influence of other conversations which would cause it to be interspersed with their fragmentary contents. We could not possibly have guessed after a given point which conversation had been fed by which talks, what we had added to other people’s talks which we transmitted to others. This meant that reported talks also underwent changes . . . live talks, just like plain truths. The fact that all these things were within the compass of his store of knowledge, the fact that he was familiar with them by direct experience, the fact that he had beheld and otherwise had personal knowledge of them had displeased me. This had led me to interpret the smile on his face as the condescending gesture of a teacher. However, what had made me restive was, in the main, the unexpected revelation of my identity, my identity in the story. I had already felt the vulnerability of the past; it possessed a kind of seductiveness; it connoted an unsatisfied sexual drive: an unfulfilled desire for sexual outlet and gratification. These words had made me blush, an indefinable shame, defying all description. I had tried to pull myself together and said: “Then, we could see to it that Berti will feel slightly off color for a little while; a colic, for instance, which will keep him in the WC for some time. The cause of this uneasiness might be our hero’s compulsion to regress to past experiences. However, he was not supposed to disclose this. When he comes back he will say: ‘I wanted you two to chat for a while, to get to know each other better.’ Thus, the seal of secrecy relating to things desired to be unsaid will be kept unbroken, and suspicion will thus be avoided.” Gordon’s reply had been: “Not too bad . . .
Berti could do it.” “I thought so,” I said, whereupon Gordon added: “Let me go out and get some fresh air.” This had caused us to chuckle once again. Gordon had not allowed us to benefit from the momentary silence and said: “Well, time to part!” After all he had not come to Istanbul for fun. We had to excuse him. In fact, he said he would be back in Istanbul again in a short while, under different conditions; when life would permit him to live as his conscience would dictate. He accompanied us leaving the hotel. He kept his eyes peeled to his surroundings with the reserve and undivided attention of a restless individual intent on getting acquainted with the neighborhood. He gave the impression of someone who had been in search of someone he had been anticipating. Berti had asked his friend—whose bond had been refreshed after so many years even for a very brief period of time—what sort of business he was engaged in. This was an issue not touched upon during our long talk. After some consideration, with his two arms spread on our shoulders, gently smiling, he whispered, as if confiding a secret: “International business, y’know!”