Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale (48 page)

Suddenly, he had looked his mother in the eye; he had felt in his bones her recalling the individuals who had played an important role in her life, the inevitable exiles and the errors committed by her next-of-kin. Where all these things would lead to sooner or later and who would be implicated in the long run was evident. However, everybody had to face this problem through his or her own perspective, according to his or her own fashion. It hadn’t been for nothing that Madame Roza had to intervene in the dispute between her son and Monsieur Jacques. They happened to be on a line of demarcation where they had to make up their mind between either one of two things offered to them in the given situation where taking one entailed rejecting the other. To this you could also add the fear of understanding, of empathizing with the problem of one’s interlocutor. Expecting that her son’s self-purification would bring about a satisfying release of tension in him, Madame Roza might have anticipated relieving her own tension by finding out what was actually the matter. After all, the act of knowing also entailed attempts at solving other problems as well as lending credence to them. Notwithstanding this relevant fact, was it at all possible to know? I’m inclined to surmise that it must not have occurred to Madame Roza to consider this eventuality. However, she at least knew how to keep a tight hold on certain people and restrain them from crossing the boundary. She was resolved to lend an ear to her son’s outpouring till he reached that boundary. Berti, on the other hand, had realized that this restricted area was the only arena in which he could make himself heard. Once again they were to tread a thorny path. To unburden oneself meant bringing something into the open, defying all dead ends; it also meant revealing one’s desire for vengeance. This feeling could be understood by no one but himself, or by someone who had a deficiency like the one he had. He unburdened himself to his heart’s content and tried to make vivid that secret passion. He had told of the hours he had spent in the company of Marcellina, of the promises they had exchanged for the sake of their future lives and about how their way to view the world had changed. He had told of the countries with inland waterways they had visited and the manner in which they had acquired their languages leisurely. He had withheld certain details, preferring to use them as raw material for his fantasies.

Monsieur Jacques had done his best never to mention this issue again after that evening. Underneath this behavior there undoubtedly lay a dodging of realities and a dogged insistence on his own opinion. This was not his first guarded utterance. Egotism and dread may have been concealed in this reserve. He persevered in his resolution; regardless of all sorts of eventualities, no one could persuade him that this nuptial bond with a stranger could be blissful to the end. To marry a foreign woman meant to be off-track. He had witnessed so many broken miscegenations despite overwhelming and passionate love and good will between the partners that had experienced this alienation . . . His mother was of the same opinion. The scene was one of those stage plays enacted in different countries in foreign languages. Madame Roza had once again shown her motherly and traditional protectiveness in order not to lose her son and had done her best to solve the matter. We could not assert that she had understood all that had been expressed. Considering her past experiences and what was supplied to her by others, she could not claim to be perceptive. Her trial had been the uphill struggle of a supplicant, ignorant of warfare. Her campaign was unwarranted according to the majority of people if one took into consideration the prevailing conditions; it was a lame contention gradually losing (and which was doomed to lose) its relevance, tenor, and rationale in the wake of skirmishes. She had been unable and unwilling to keep silent and dodge the issue like her husband, her lifelong consort, who had tried to exercise his paternity over their children through a puerile approach, in total disregard of realities liable to undergo change, to wear away in time or to perpetuate its vitality forever. She was firmly convinced of the existence of good grounds for her struggle in defiance of the declarations of her son and of those who led a life similar to his. Mother and son had engaged in interminable dialogues throughout those nights replete with problems; they had sat up late into the night and drank large cups of coffee and tried to go back to their far distant past. The image of the fig tree in the garden of their house on the island, whose plentiful yield every other year warranted their generous distribution of figs to the people of the neighborhood; of the worms that ate away the figs fallen to the ground; of the bathroom with the marble basin heated every Friday morning by a wood stove; of their going cycling; of Mimico; of those hot pastries that Madame Victoria used to send them now and then and of the pastelicos; although so long ago, still fresh in the store of his memory. All these incidents had taken place on an island, on
the
island; the point at hand was the expression of wistfulness; a wistfulness more or less familiar to everybody which ran alongside everybody’s life; a wistfulness that everybody would wish to share with someone. His mother was no exception; she had told so much about her past, about the prehistory of the house they lived in . . . That fig tree, the odors that emanated from the garden, those nights each had its respective past laden with reminiscences. He had to be considerate and show tact in his relationship with his father. Such marriages that interfered with the ‘natural’ order of life never proved to be successful. Everybody was doomed to be consumed in the darkness of his fate. He should bear in mind the case of his maternal aunt Estreya. Where had she gone? To the other extremity of Istanbul, she had to sever all contact with everybody, even with her next-of-kin. Yet, she was the most beautiful girl of the family. Had she so desired she might have been among the elite of society. Had she seen the light? No one could hazard a guess, no one, even Estreya herself. However, regardless of any plausible answer we cannot deny the fact that there are moments in everybody’s life when one feels that it is too late. He should have his wits about him and be careful not to forget this; for, to forget often meant dodging one’s own reality; was their decision to go to the other extremity of Istanbul not an attempt at escape? They hadn’t even had a baby; they were well aware that they were ‘poles apart.’ People they had carried over from their past to their present and had stayed true to them had convinced them of—nay inculcated them with—the fact that they were a mismatched couple. People had exposed this to them. He might well beget children from a foreign woman; but then . . . He didn’t want to think that there was the chance of his child being a boy; oh no, no circumcision . . . a creature whose origin would remain a mystery; could he shoulder such a responsibility? What could he transmit to this child that would give meaning to their existence from their recorded history marred by trials and tribulations? Had their unending Sisyphean ordeal been pointless? How far could this woman, who had not had any experience of being estranged, comprehend all these things? The fact that marriage had nothing to do with love and that cohabitation changed the parties to the point of estrangement from each other had become a platitude. Supposing that the woman agreed to come over to Istanbul, would her consent be long lasting? She was a stranger after all. She might well disavow her earlier declaration and desire to return home. What then? Would he be disposed to follow in her footsteps to a land to which he was not familiar? He was expected to stay where he was, in his hometown where he was familiar with every nook and cranny. He was blessed with contentment; or at least he should be. He had attended a very good school; he had found true love. That was all very well, but everything had an end, an inevitable return to one’s roots. Everybody had responsibilities that devolved; so decisions were to be taken nearer to the people they would affect; responsibilities that one could not shirk, evade, or avoid. He would have parental responsibilities like in all other families and communities. He was the eldest of the family. He was supposed to take over the flag and carry it to a predetermined spot as in a relay race. Life was as simple as that after all. People who complicated things blinded themselves to such realities. Madame Roza herself was an elder sister who had her matronly duties and shouldered this obligation all too well. Even from the time of her adolescence, she had done her best to hold the family members united and had had to assume diverse frames of reference over the course of time; there had been dropouts certainly either due to demise or willful separation. Yet this did not prevent her from undertaking this responsibility. Her fate was sealed. She had to resign herself to it.

Three or four months had gone by. Berti had been fooling around, frequenting his old chums, watching movies, browsing books, and carrying on his research work. During his secluded meditations in his chamber on his experiences and on what he had left behind, he was beginning to comprehend better the ineluctable fate of which his mother used to speak so much. He was haunted by the voices of his past. His experiences in Cambridge had been permanently settled in his memory, inaccessible to anyone but himself. Was it a fear that gripped him that was caused by the fact that he was being persecuted by the idea that barred his way back to those places? On the one hand, there was an immediate past which could be transformed into a future heavily laden with rich fantasies, and on the other hand a past more realistic than his distant past, his distant history lived or left unlived had gradually built up and he was becoming more and more conscious of its ineluctability as time went by. Whose future would it be, whose past, in truth? Long were the days. It appeared to him at the time that his father came back home in the evening from another world. They had failed to share and brood over those days, making comments as they might have done. Years had to pass and other losses had to be suffered before they could do so. This was his struggle against other extraneous things, against other languages, beliefs, and silences . . . Not an easy job . . . I could understand this. To the extent my imagination and my vocabulary allowed, I would have a better insight into the fact that a back and forth struggle against extrinsic things could not possibly be waged without receiving serious wounds. Long days they were . . . But those days also had their nights for Berti, nights during which he conversed with Jerry and with whom he believed he shared certain things. Berti would speak to me of those nights with some despondency; a despondence tinged with remorse; a remorse which I was to account for later upon discovering a clue. Jerry had never felt at home in his school, which he was obliged to finish in one way or another. He was industrious enough but had to face the strict discipline of the friars. He smoked and had almost become an alcoholic. When, under another climate he had found himself hedged in by different prevailing conditions, he had felt he had already covered a good distance; he was grown up and experienced what loneliness was. He spoke of Nietzsche and was engrossed in mythology; American sedans and existentialism were subjects of his day-to-day talk, while his dream at the time was to become a singer. He had learned how to play the guitar; he was dabbling in musical compositions and writing poetry. Were these a new version of his childish fantasies? He spoke of Claudette, his biology teacher who exuded sex appeal; she was young and burgeoning, disposed to encounter dangers and risks and to cope with the new and unknown. She had even invited him to her home a few times. However, all these fanciful stories had proved to be unfounded, as became clear during his interrogation before the disciplinary committee of the school. The plaintiff was the teacher of biology. One day Jerry had brought a frog to school and requested his teacher to demonstrate her assertion that the anatomy of the animal was similar to the anatomy of a human being. The poor woman who had observed it leaping onto the table could not help losing consciousness. The administration had convened the concerned to make a deposition regarding the case. Whereupon Berti, being qualified to give evidence regarding the matter under inquiry had reported to the board in the company of his mother. He had the opportunity to interpret the incident in its true colors. The teacher had been a woman content with her store of generally accepted patterns of knowledge who tried to suppress her drive by overcompensation. Caught unawares, he had had difficulty in restraining himself from laughing at this unexpected incident. Nonetheless the case was serious. Jerry was facing expulsion. However, Berti, thanks to the refined manners of a British gentleman he had acquired as a consequence of his education and upbringing, had succeeded in settling the matter amicably. What had been the cause of all these things, of these lies, of these little tricks? Jerry’s contention was that she hated the smart-alecks that besieged him. He had shut up and remained silent and inhaled sharply the smoke of his cigarette before blurting out: “It seems we are fated to be at cross purposes with it.” Did he mean the school board by ‘it’? Days were to show that words had a plurality of meanings. One could not always clearly and explicitly understand the figurative and double meanings of words. These words were exchanged between him and Jerry in their rooms. “Had I been in your place, I would have left,” said Jerry. Who could have vouched for the fact that he had a completely different future in mind? “Why not go and ask Aunt Estreya’s opinion?” he said. Berti had suddenly become aware that it had been years now since he had last seen her. He felt confused. To forsake or to deny must not have been so easy. To consign people to oblivion, to see that they abide in their proper climate must not have been so easy. He used to listen to Elgar’s music at the time . . . He remembered Mr. Page who had covered his tracks . . . He should have been a witness to these moments . . . He should have been able to converse with him now . . . . Madame Estreya had not been an auricular witness to the conversation that had taken place during those nights. Everybody in his own climate was in pursuit of his own self. Berti had felt the pang of having failed to pay a visit to his Aunt Estreya at the time. His pangs of guilt resulted from the feeling that he would no longer be able to see a place he had left far away. However, he realized, when he recalled those days, that the matter of regret, far deeper than the bitter experiences he would have afterward, was particularly due to his having forsaken his beloved while he was carrying on with his life in Istanbul. This was a stage play well-known to me, in which I had had a role and of which I had also been a spectator. Therefore, the regret in question might not have been made explicit. This was one of those sentiments innate in your heart to which you should give their due only when you had paid a price for them; one of those sentiments which I could never obliterate once I had supplanted Berti in his original place in his adventures with his companions. In one of the days following his return to Istanbul, as someone who had failed to find what he had been looking for, burdened with questions without answers, his father had broken the silence reigning in the house with his soft voice and said: “This has been dragging on too long now. It’s high time that you made your choice between ‘her,’ ‘them,’ and ‘us.’” This must have been the climax of the dispute. It was evident that the personal pronoun ‘her’ was not limited to Marcellina alone, and ‘us’ did not merely signify ‘our’ family. It was whether he should choose the path that would lead him stripped naked straight to love with all its effects, or remain in his actual haven. Berti happened to be facing a bifurcation, he had to make up his mind and opt for either of the two alternatives. He had thus made his decision in defiance of those people, the words that they had inculcated in his mind and of all the eventualities involved. Having opted for security, he had partially been the author of his own lost paradise. Only a few steps would have sufficed to touch that paradise. The magic was concealed in those steps. However, there was no other way but to set off into the twilight. Logic and deduction would enable you to guess how the story would unfold as dictated by its heroes and heroines. Here was hidden a history of slavery; was it exclusive to Berti?