Many and Many a Year Ago (15 page)

“All this time during which he was struggling to bring me up flawlessly, he also seemed to be blaming me for the suffering he had had to endure in his own childhood. Now, at least, he could have the pleasure of disparaging the diplomas I'd earned if I came home empty-handed. My savior was the mysterious Jake Mifune, who occupied the seat on my left on the plane to Tokyo. This middle-aged man with part-Japanese blood spoke only once in the course of the entire flight.

“Discovering that I was Turkish, he said, ‘I visited your city twice when my uncle worked at the American consulate in Istanbul.'

“I spent the week in Tokyo stressed out. Japan's war wounds were only beginning to heal. Among the companies I talked to there were none that did not have cash problems. Still, they seemed to be interested in the watches as long as they could pay for them in installments on fixed terms. That night as I sat pondering darkly in the deserted lobby of my hotel, Jake Mifune walked past. I could hardly believe my eyes. He was quietly scolding a group of men in suits treading carefully behind him. I thought he hadn't seen me but just as I stood up there he was, asking ‘What's the problem?' in the sweet-and-sour tone of the neighborhood tough guy, and I proceeded to tell him.

“‘If I were in New York, I'd give your father a good thumping,' he said. ‘But in Tokyo my cousin Taro may be able to help you.'

“The nosy bellboy who led me to the restaurant at Ginza told me that Taro was the most famous eel chef in the city. I had first to prove to this cousin who reeked of fish that I was not a pure-blooded American. After that test he gave me the address of his customer Shizoku Nasu, whom he described as ‘quite honest despite being a gourmet'. I met the francophone Nasu at his tiny office, permeated with
chansons
, in the strategic Shinjuku district. Nasu proposed to take the watches in exchange for necklaces of black pearl. As if I wasn't already dazzled by these gems worthy of a pharaoh's treasury, he said, ‘They're twice as valuable as the white ones, but if you lose money on a sale I can make up for it by supplying you with extras.' Since I was flying back the next day I had no opportunity to verify his claim. I showed up in New York with a bag full of black pearls in exchange for 30,000 watches. The pearls proved to be worth four times as much as the white ones, and I ended up making two more trips to Tokyo that year.

“Well, it was a bit awkward for me to ask Shizoku, who lived with his sick mother, about the source of those necklaces. But it was obvious that in the U.S. and Europe, whose post-war economies were booming, these gems were desirable objects. And they could only be produced by the Japanese. We invited Shizoku to New York for Christmas of 1950. Apparently unimpressed by the Waldorf-Astoria where we'd put him, he wandered out to discover the city by himself. On his last night he wanted to go to an Argentinean steak house and listen to music. I took him to Cabaña las Violetas. I was a bit diffident when the waiter told me there would also be a dance show – I was prejudiced against tangos by my father, who always said, ‘Tangos are like
kemençe
tunes. You hear one, you've heard them all.' But when the blind Argentinean musician laid hands on his bandoneon I felt a tingle. The melody pouring out of that old instrument was a flame to kindle a new day. Twenty minutes later three casually dressed couples took to the stage. I focused my attention on the olive-skinned girl with a turned-up nose and an inviting smile on her face. The way she wrinkled her brow during the dramatic passes was completely charming, and the way she frowned when she embraced her partner made me shiver with pleasure. When Julio the headwaiter saw me sitting in the same place at the foot of the stage for the third time, he grasped the situation and helped me out. A generous tip brought forth the happy news that, no, Rosalba Martinez was not in a relationship with her dance partner. He then conveyed to her the notes that we wrote together in Spanish and attached to bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolate. Finally I was able to meet the skittish girl on a gloomy Sunday at a café next to the restaurant.

“We walked toward Broadway, which was flowing like the Amazon, and I considered stretching out my hand for the forbidden fruit. We went into a café named Artwin and I remember praying, ‘Please let her turn out to be stupid so that I can just drink a cup of coffee and get away.' But I was already under her spell. Born twenty-two years earlier in Buenos Aires, Rosalba Anna-Graziella Martinez was unpretentious and enchanting. She had a sense of humor. About Istanbul she said, ‘Isn't that where they made Aladdin's carpet?' She exuded self-confidence and wore simple but chic clothes. I can still describe what she had on that day, down to the buttons on her blouse. She was perfectly aware that she was shaking me to the core with her straightforward language and the twinkle in her eye.

“On our second date we watched a romantic movie at a musty theater in Spanish Harlem. By the third date, as I kissed her goodnight on the cheek, I was sure I'd found the love of my life. We began meeting like high-school kids smitten with puppy love. Sundays always meant the movies. We walked the back streets hand in hand, and if she felt like whistling a tune I felt like I was floating in the air. Twice a week or more I was at Cabaña las Violetas. If I said to her, ‘Don't raise your left leg so high, people can see your underwear,' she would raise it higher with a coy look. I can still see it.

“She had had to break off her training in ballet to look after her twin siblings when her father died of a heart attack. I was twenty-seven and my family was already tense with the effort of finding me a suitable Jewish bride with a satisfactory dowry. About the time my mother wanted me to meet the daughter of a diamond wholesaler on 47th Street, Rosalba's troupe was on the point of leaving for Chicago. Telling my mother I had a lover was a relief to me, even though she cried and beat her thighs like a Muslim woman. When my father got the news, he wasn't slow to deliver an ultimatum: leave the girl or leave home immediately! Next morning as I packed my belongings I felt like a prisoner who's received the surprising news that he's been freed.

“I moved in with my pal Bernie Jacobsen, who worked at the Chemical Bank. My mother's efforts as a go-between proved futile, and my father disowned me. As an undergraduate at N.Y.U. I'd been a scholarship student, so I still had some of the money left that Baruch Shapiro had earmarked for my education. When my father's secretary brought it to me, she informed me in tears that I was no longer welcome in my father's presence, even at his funeral. Rosalba, who spent the spring working in Chicago and Detroit, was amazed at my ordeal. If I was job-hunting in New York two days a week, I was running after her the rest of the time. We planned to get married as soon as I found a decent job. If I wanted my future wife to stop dancing in front of those haughty young men, my salary would have to support her family in Buenos Aires.

“I founded a go-between company called Black Beauty Ltd. and became Nasu's New York representative. Puerto Rican Julio, who played matchmaker to Rosalba and me, said on his first day as my employee, ‘I'll bring luck to you.' We did good business in a market where certain unscrupulous Japanese organizations were passing off painted stones as black pearls. We multiplied our profits by living up to our promises about quality and quantity. When I married Rosalba in 1952, I had an apartment on Park Avenue and the latest Dodge sedan. But my wife didn't feel completely at home in the richest district of New York, and her first pregnancy resulted in miscarriage. Just as she was starting to pull herself together she was devastated by the news that one of her twin brothers had drowned in the Río Plata. We traveled to Buenos Aires; she couldn't leave her depressed mother for months. The next three years of traveling between New York and Buenos Aires left her exhausted. In her absences I followed Shizoku's advice and went to South Asia in search of precious stones. For a while, at least, the profits I made were embarrassing to me, especially those I made at the expense of distressed maharajahs. I was thirty-two and rich when our son Salvador was born in our Buenos Aires house. My travel on the United States-South Asia-Argentina triangle intensified when my wife finally decided that she could no longer bear to leave Buenos Aires. Rosalba attributed the lack of friction in our marriage to these continual separations. Her capacity for compromise and her unassuming attitude enabled her to manage me and her problematic mother for years.

“Our daughter Daniela was forty days old when my father died in the summer of 1958. In keeping with his will, my mother refused to see me. She was ninety by the time I managed to get admitted to her presence, and then she confused me with Musa, the son of the
imam
who was our neighbor in Balat.

“‘Musa,' my mother said to me on her hundredth birthday, ‘if you see Gerda, tell her I'm tired of waiting for a letter.'

“She never spoke again, but turned into a kind of radiant statue. I've come to like her saintly disposition. I enjoy sitting at her side once every three months when I visit her in New York. She strokes my cheek and whispers Old Testament verses to me, and I recall the
ezans
I used to hear in Balat.

“In the summer of 1960 I went to French Polynesia, where they'd begun the experimental production of black pearls. They told me that black pearls were troublesome to produce but that the start-up cost was not terribly prohibitive. I took special note of two critical steps in the process: the injecting of ‘seeds' into the oysters that were then lowered into the ocean with special nets, and the impeccable care lavished on them for more than eighteen months underwater. So first I founded a company called ‘Noir Est Noir', then I set up a processing plant on Mangareva Island. I brought in Japanese professionals but couldn't put together a competent local team to take care of the underwater maintenance. Only when I had a synagogue built on the island to attract Ethiopian Jewish divers was my destiny realized of becoming the world's leading black pearl producer. The cost of a single large and flawless Type A black pearl starts at a $1,000, and there will never be a lack of women willing to pay $30,000 to get on a two-year waiting list for a small pearl necklace. I was nudging the billionaire level by the age of fifty-four, the year of the heart attack that I concealed from my wife. I gradually reduced my work load, and when Salvador came onto the scene I gave up all the routine chores.

“Rosalba and I went to Europe after her mother died, and I returned to the country of my birth after forty years. Most of my relatives were dead and the rest were scattered to the four corners of the earth.

“Rosalba really liked hearing the
ezan
and seeing Arnavutköy and the Mihrimah Sultan mosque at Edirnekapı in Istanbul, and meeting the İzmir people who called her ‘Auntie.' She never interfered with my work. I began to fear for her psychological health, though, because she never wanted to change her style or her philosophy even though she was married to perhaps the richest man in Argentina. I almost grew used to the way her uneasiness rose in proportion to the rise in my wealth. The last two things that brought her happiness, I suppose, were Daniela's graduation as an honors student from the Düsseldorf College of Music and her subsequent appointment to a cellist's chair on the Boston Symphony Orchestra. My wife didn't see her seventieth birthday. I was on a business trip to Tahiti with my son when we lost her. They said she'd been struggling with an incurable ovarian tumor. Apparently she'd mentioned this to her daughter six months earlier but to nobody else, because she didn't want to spoil the happiness the family had enjoyed for ten years.

“I thought it would ease my pain if I threw myself into my work again, but it was useless. I never forgave myself for spending all those days without her for the sake of my financial ambitions. My respect for my wife increased with her death, yet I was immersed in guilt. In her honor I shut myself up in this soulless building. I've never succeeded even in throwing away her handkerchiefs. Some days I go twice to visit her grave at the Recoleta Cemetery. She used to be frightened by thunder; now whenever I hear thunder I get goose bumps. Now that she's gone, my secret paradise Mangareva just annoys me. I never leave Recoleta except to visit my mother. She made me laugh the last time I saw her, after I'd completed my wife's mausoleum. ‘Musa,' she whispered in my ear, ‘have you been circumcised?'

“Yesterday was the anniversary of Rosalba's death. I've confessed to you what I haven't been able to tell my insensitive fifty-year-old son. Your face eases the heart and your eyes do not judge. If you've brought news from heaven, tell me. What do you want from this poor Roditi, my countryman?”

Moved by his story, I related the story of Esther and Ali.

“Eli's grandmother and mine were cousins,” he said. “People used to call Eli, who had nothing going for him except his good looks, ‘the actor.' It was a bit of a joke to me when he approached me on my fortieth birthday with a proposal to become my business partner. He wouldn't listen to reason, and he took serious offense when I said no. I hardly knew him! We would nod to each other from a distance if we happened to see each other, but that was all. It wasn't difficult to see that he and his elegant wife were a poor match. Losing money would have been avoidable if he hadn't mixed with the wrong people. It was said that he was the most handsome and the least talented Jew in Argentina's long immigration history.

“It took seven years for him to cross my path again. One evening as I was getting into my car to go home, he opened the door and sat down in the front seat and started crying. That was when I learned that he was in partnership with an Armenian jeweler from Istanbul. He begged for a loan to replace what he'd taken secretly from the safe and lost on the stock market. I knew he'd never keep his promise, and he didn't, but two years later he got me again with a note he sent to my table at a business lunch. This time it was his daughter. If he failed to pay her tuition immediately she was going to be expelled from her private school. I gave him the money and told him, ‘From now on, the only help you can expect from me is paying for your funeral expenses.' He didn't even feign embarrassment.