Many and Many a Year Ago (12 page)

“This could be a trick somebody's playing on your eccentric neighbor, but I'll never rest if I don't go to Belgrano, Kemal. I'm ready to run the risk of playing the goat in somebody's expensive joke, if that's what it is.

“I can't help feeling that your Anatolian wild goose chase was preparing you for this Argentinean chapter. We'll have to modify our travel plans a bit. Let's first fly to Buenos Aires for a five-day reconnaissance. We don't need visas. Winter is about to start there, but they say the temperature never falls below fifteen degrees. You'd better pack your fall clothes …”

The next evening we were on a flight headed to London and then Buenos Aires. As I buckled my seat belt I felt like the reluctant driver of a garishly decorated horse cart. Professor Ali, who was afraid of flying, closed his eyes. To my left sat a green-eyed young man. He was trying to get his hands on the single-malt whisky reserved for first class passengers by touching the stewardess's arm and whispering in her ear.

That first flight from Istanbul to London that I'd taken fifteen years ago to study English was what, to a certain extent, had awakened my passion for flying. But now, as this BA 677 set down at Heathrow, it was a deserted café in Beyoğlu named Londracula that was on my mind. Slogging from Terminal One to Terminal Four gave me the feeling of having landed in two foreign countries simultaneously. We grabbed something to eat then stopped in at an adjacent bookstore. While Professor Ali was browsing through the magazines I found a copy of
Love in the Time of Cholera
on the shelf and read the blurb:
Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza's impassioned advances and married Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead …
As we boarded the clunky aircraft that would take us to Buenos Aires via São Paolo, I asked Professor Ali if he thought it was the greatest romantic novel of all.

“It's not how many years you've had to wait for your darling, but what you've had to endure while you were waiting,” he said.

We hopped like a kangaroo on the deserted São Paulo runway shining in the early morning light. The numbed São Paulo passengers filed out of the plane, and the uniformed mulattos of the janitorial crew filed in. Bored, I regarded the shy women at their chores. Without taking their eyes off the floor they were somehow managing to check out the male passengers. It was only two more hours to our final destination. I began to calculate in how many minutes—ten, maybe—I could cover the distance in an F-16, but it was depressing. I resolved not to say a word beyond “Good morning” to my next neighbor.

The stewardess was announcing take-off when an attractive young woman came toward me with confident steps. I concentrated on her snow-white trousers as though I'd been assigned to find a spot on them. I was devastated when she sank into the seat beside me without so much as a “Good morning.” Even
I
couldn't miss the pleasing symmetry of her turned-up nose, wide brow, and ponytail. It didn't surprise me when she immediately produced a book from her purse to hide behind. I inhaled her intense perfume and bent closer to the “Buenos Aires Statistics” section of my guidebook.

I skimmed through her book while she was in the restroom. For me to weary of a novel, it's enough to glance at the plot summary. I was a bit alarmed, however, by the synopsis of
The Tango Singer
by Tomás E. Martinez:
Bruno Cadogan has flown from New York to Buenos Aires in search of the elusive and legendary Julio Martel, a tango singer whose voice has never been recorded yet is said to be so beautiful it is almost supernatural
was too close to the probable parameters of our own mission. The title page bore a dedication: “To Sheila-Lucy, fugitive from Gemini.” The fountain pen that wrote one word in green and the next in black apparently belonged to one E.S. As Sheila-Lucy came crisply back to her seat, it struck me that she knew very well how her sulky countenance contributed to her mystery. She disappeared again into her book and I feared she would realize, with the intuition of her astrological sign, that I had riffled through it. Every now and again she would raise her head and narrow her eyes to focus on some unknown point, and it looked as if she were posing patiently for a portrait painter.

Whose profile did Sheila-Lucy's remind me of? This idle question quickly grew into an obsession that made me forget my apprehension.

Our stewardess gave us two forms to be filled out and turned in to passport control.

“It's like entering the U.S.A.,” Professor Ali said.

Had I not been so engrossed in this Sheila-Lucy woman, I might have been more acutely aware of his rising anxiety.

“If a terrorist suddenly changed this plane's destination to Istanbul, I wouldn't mind at all,” he confessed as I was filling out his form.

On the descent to Ezeiza Airport I had the crazy idea that the sky would fill suddenly with bandoneon tunes and our clunky vehicle, trying to cut a couple of simple tango figures, would miss the landing strip.

At last, Buenos Aires.

Professor Ali didn't approve of the party atmosphere in Arrivals. I appreciated that he at least managed not to scold the assistant at the exchange bureau who insisted on seeing his passport. To get a taxi we first had to queue up in front of a cash payment booth, then, with receipt in hand, join another queue.

“Kemal, have we been thrown into an Iron Curtain country of twenty years ago?” the professor grumbled.

The undernourished porter said to follow him and picked up the lightest suitcase, thus letting us know what kind of tips he expected. Ali, to my surprise, didn't say something like, “After all that, we damned well better get a limousine.” We crammed ourselves into a Renault-9 and I felt as nervous as if we were passing into Turkey through an eastern border gate. But as we neared what looked like the city center, I began to appreciate it in the manner of somebody leaping from Anatolia to Istanbul. The wide streets of Buenos Aires, a city established on flat ground thirteen centuries later than Constantinople, looked like a scrap yard for old cars.

I amused myself by saying, “Has every thirty-year-old Peugeot 504 on earth decided to retire to this backwater?”

I was thinking that Argentina and Turkey were like two cousins who couldn't shake off their chronic illnesses long enough to get together, when the taxi driver broke into an old folk song.

The huge Buenos Aires Sheraton put me in mind of the elegant “Mediterranean Statue” stuck in a hidden corner of Istanbul. I handed my bag to the bellboy but Professor Ali, following me, insisted on carrying his own heavy suitcase, stumbling and falling flat on his face. He limped to reception on his own, refusing to take my arm, but ten minutes after we'd retired to our rooms he knocked on the door. I opened it to find him sinking to the floor, groaning in pain. The ankle was swollen; he couldn't stand on it. We had to put him on a stretcher for the trip by ambulance to Arrivadavia Hospital. The receptionist Ricardo accompanied us, trying to make up for his lack of English by grinning perpetually.

After the ordeal of registration we were ushered into the presence of a dark-haired doctor whose nametag read “Armando Kaltakian.”

He saw me smiling as I read it and said, in perfect Turkish, “If you're smiling at my surname rather than my face, you're amused by your own limited vocabulary.” I was taken aback. “Maybe it's true that the word
kaltak
has been abused as ‘whore' in street slang, but what it really means is the wooden part of a saddle. My forefathers were the most respectable saddle-makers in Malatya. They were the major suppliers for Ottoman sultans and pashas.”

It was like reliving the embarrassment of the time I got caught cheating on an exam. Kaltakian saw my face fall and leaned over to whisper, “Come on, let's get this old coot back on his feet.” As he listened to Ali he patted his head and took his pulse like a virtuoso tuning his instrument. Tenderly he probed his right ankle. Watching the physician nimbly apply his cure I could easily visualize his ancestors in Malatya working on those saddles. Giving the professor some rehydration pills and painkillers, he said, “Keep your ankle bandaged for five days, Professor. Except for bathroom calls, don't let that foot touch the floor. Rest as much as you can. On the fourth day the swelling should go down and you can try walking, though without putting too much pressure on your ankle.
Geçmiş olsun
as we say in Turkish. Get well soon.”

I knew that Professor Ali, now that his pain was lessening, wouldn't let this mysterious doctor off so easily. The self-proclaimed Armando was backed into a corner by his patient's questions.

“My real name is Armenak,” he admitted, “and I'm from Pangaltı—thank God—in Istanbul. My father, believing that ‘Turkey was finished' after the 1980 coup, sent me to Argentina—the land of military coups. The financial situation here is no better than in Turkey. I work extra jobs so that I can see the city I was born in every two years.”

Armenak of Pangaltı seated his whining patient in a wheelchair and pushed him to the ambulance. He never asked what we were doing in Buenos Aires. He handed me his card and kissed the professor's hand farewell. Ricardo, who now thought we were friends, grew frustrated with me on the way back to the hotel when I didn't know the Argentinean player on Istanbul's Fenerbahçe football team. In an attempt to distract him I asked the number of rooms in the hotel.

It was comical how my companion settled himself into bed, groaning in pain but enjoying himself all the same. I waited expectantly for him to evaluate the latest events and double the chores for me on his list.

“Look, my dear Kemal,” he said. “It's obvious that I haven't come here with romantic expectations. My intention was only to visit Esther's grave and arrange a meeting with her daughter Stella if possible. As Armenak was bandaging my ankle it occurred to me that this little accident might be a sign. It looks as if Esther doesn't want me to visit her grave. I'm sure, one way or another, she'll eventually explain why.

“I want you to go to that address we have. An unexpected clue might surface and direct us to Stella. Why not? I worry about her. I don't know why but I believe she needs help. Ask the hotel to get you a private guide and try to enjoy Buenos Aires while you're at it. We can have breakfast together and meet in the evenings to discuss our progress. Fortunately I brought the novel I'm about to start translating with me. I may as well get started on a draft. And please, don't forget that we're only booked in here for five days.”

He gave me $5,000 in cash for expenses. As I left his room I realized that I hadn't communicated with my inner voice for a long time. This new wave of excitement, I thought, might provide an opportunity to see if my hand was getting any better.

To set out on a quest for two ghosts in a metropolis I'd set foot in only hours before, a quest moreover colored by Professor Ali's skepticism, did not inspire confidence. If he hadn't brought along his translation work it might not have crossed my mind that the professor had planned all along to take himself out of the search by staging an accident.

Since Buenos Aires was experiencing the mild beginnings of winter, the most popular guides were either on holiday or already booked. So as soon as I heard that Ariel Gluckman, an eccentric but intelligent guide, was available, I arranged to meet him immediately. He said he could be at the hotel in two hours so I went out to the nearby high street, Florida, to kill some time. What revealed the country's dire economic straits better than the quantity or quality of goods in the modest window displays was their prices, which were convenient even for a Turkish tourist's budget. Worried-looking men in tired suits and old women in fake fur coats stood in front of their shops, desperately offering fliers to passersby. It was fascinating to watch the stream of pedestrians flowing over sidewalks and disappearing down the street in tango steps, dancing to tunes that, possibly, only they could hear. I liked the way they looked, anti-
lumpen
in their tired but chic clothes, and I felt that I could sit and drink coffee with almost anyone walking down this street. Music shops breathed life into semi-deserted arcades. I couldn't tear myself away from a rhythmical
milonga
seeping out at the corner of Florida and Tucuman. From that hoarse but smooth female voice I breathed in the sorrow that permeated the city. When the song ended I barged into the shop and discovered that the mysterious voice belonged to Adriana Varela. I walked back to the hotel with her CD containing “Milonga de pelo largo” in hand. In the cover picture the singer looked as provocative as a Buenos Aires billboard and as glorious as a beauty queen. I wanted to yell, “Stella Arditti, I'm going to find you sooner or later,” but by a slip of the tongue I pronounced the name of her dead mother instead.

The bar's single customer, forced to watch football on TV, had to be Ariel Gluckman. I admired his concentration on reading a pocket book-sized tome despite his thick smoke-colored glasses. With each page he turned he buried his nose deeper in the book, and yes, he was sniffing the print. It looked as if the last tuft of hair on his elliptical head would fly away with the first gust of wind. I would have laughed at the joke he made about my fifteen-minute delay if I'd understood it. (I couldn't tell him about the ten-minute surveillance he'd been under.) His tone was feminine but assertive and his English was fluent. I felt too weary to refuse this tiny young man who looked like the ever-youthful Tintin. When he became emotional on hearing the reason why we'd come to Buenos Aires, it was good enough for me. Tucking his book into his backpack, he said, “My fee is $80 a day. If we use my car I charge fifteen pesos per hour and 300 pesos—$100 dollars—in advance for expenses.”