Many and Many a Year Ago (16 page)

“I felt sympathetic toward Stella, who looked like her paternal grandmother. She had a little temper and a lot of attractiveness. I hired her to work in my public relations office, where she stayed until she became Miss Argentina. She always took her father's side when her parents argued and so eventually became distanced from her mother. Her second marriage was to an Australian diplomat, and when she came to say goodbye, she vowed never to set foot in this town again.

“I kept my promise to Eli when I took care of his funeral expenses after the accident twenty years ago. Esther appeared more grief-stricken during the funeral than I'd expected. Nobody saw her after that; but if she'd died, I would have heard about it. If it's any help, you can take it to the bank that that headstrong Ä°zmir woman would never chase after her daughter. Once I met Eli's old partner, Dikran Gumushian, and remembered that my father never let me play with the Armenian kids. He told me that Eli had suffered a psychological breakdown and was dealing in used cars. Dikran is a likeable man. If he's still alive he would be about seventy-five. You might find out more about Esther if you ask around among the jewelers at Libertad. Interestingly, Dikran and Esther behaved as if they were quite close friends at Eli's funeral …”

After a brief but adequate silence I thanked him and politely requested permission to take my leave. He insisted on giving me a brooch of black pearls in a glittering box. “This ruinous object will be locked up eventually in some woman's jewelry box,” he said. “And for you, my countryman, I have a message: A man who has never had an unforgettable woman in his life has not lived, but merely existed on this earth.”

We were both surprised when I kissed the weary hand that he stretched out and laid on my forehead. His eyes filled with tears and I quickly took refuge in the elevator.

Ariel was sitting at the bar in the lobby of the Alvear Palace reading Samuel Beckett's
Ill Seen, Ill Said
. It seemed to me that he disapproved of my seeing Izak Roditi without him.

“Did you know that this is the year of Beckett's one hundredth birthday?” he said.

“Did you know that ‘Godot' was coined from ‘God' and ‘idiot'?” I said.

We visited the Recoleta Cemetery before commencing our search for Dikran the jeweler. I felt no nostalgia for Z. when I beheld the
tableau vivante
created by the marble tombs of Recoleta. Avoiding the commotion caused by tourists trying to get their pictures taken next to Evita's monument, we came to Roditi's wife's place of eternal rest. It was a jet-black pyramid. Her effigy was inscribed on each side. Ariel translated the lines on the side facing the street; I was sure they were borrowed from a Turkish poet:

Libertad had lost its old dynamism; the perpetual economic crisis had caused links in the caravan of jewelers to be broken. The obstinate middle-aged Armenian caretaker we spoke to said he'd never heard of a Dikran Gumushian. Then I remembered Dr. Kaltakian. We rushed to Ariel's office and bookstore to call him. The bookstore was as tightly organized as a military archive and smelled strangely of hay. I reached Dr. Armando Kaltakian on the fourth attempt. He sounded glad to hear that I needed his help. “If I can't call you with the information you want in two hours, I'll fax it to your hotel this evening,” he said. I decided to take a stroll along Corrientes.

As I emerged onto the spacious avenue I felt the same sense of relief I used to feel when math classes were over. I wandered along accompanied by gentle gusts of wind. Was this a mirage, or was I seeing in this faraway land shops that I knew window by window? Were these the cinemas and theaters that were etched into my memory by years of movie-going? Like Anatolia, the streets were saturated with people walking as if they were playing parts in a pantomime behind a giant lace curtain. I walked to the head of the street, where a musician in an orange velvet jacket had situated himself. His legs were amputated below the knees and, if you ask me, he was willfully murdering the melody of “Over the Rainbow” with his harmonica. I poured all the coins in my pocket into the tango hat in front of him, and he thanked me by winking at me twice. I entered the desolate café behind him and sobered up on bad coffee brought to me by a waitress who thought that Istanbul was the capital of Egypt.

I went back to the bookstore, but gazing at the shelves of tired books was making me sleepy. I selected
Las Poemas de Edgar Poe
and felt satisfied to have filled a gap in the library I never touched. I wasn't surprised when Ariel didn't give me a discount. As I was imagining a competition for the most attractive cover among the complete works of Nobel Prize-winning Jews, a fax message arrived:

Brother Kemal
,

Master Dikran will be at a café called Confitería Ideal tomorrow morning at eleven o'clock. I tried describing your features to him but he said there was no need. He is from Istanbul and can spot a young Turkish fellow by the way he walks into a room
.

Good luck
.

Dr. A.K
.

As Ariel was dropping me off at the hotel, he told me how he had met a Turkish bibliophile.

“I didn't think he would know about the rare book dealers here. Anyway, he was middle-aged and looked like an Italian, though with a surly face. He said he wrote novels and essays under a pseudonym. His Spanish was more satisfactory than that of the Boca Juniors football players. He told me, ‘Whenever the name Borges is pronounced, I think of Dali.' He'd been to a town in Patagonia whose name he wouldn't tell me. But he didn't mind telling me why he was here: he had bought the first volume of Aulus Gellius's
Attic Nights
, translated into English in 1795, from an Istanbul dealer last year. This book was actually, as the naïve dealer arrogantly confided, a $3 acquisition from the nephew of a White Russian who died at the age of 105. According to an inscription dated 19 September 1908 on the title page, the book belonged to a Constance Radcliffe who worked at the British embassy in Istanbul. It contained numerous passages underlined in Indian ink. When these were combined, they formed a message:

I can no longer tolerate the burden of the sin laid on me. I want to shake off the curse of this secret that will change the history books
.

If Markham and Unsworth at Burlington Arcade (London) still stands, you are not too late
.

Take this book there. You will be rewarded with the second volume
.

“So he goes to London. Markham and Unsworth at Piccadilly is now a fountain-pen boutique. The owner of the shop, who's in his eighties, says, ‘I suppose I don't have the right to ask you why you are so late?' and hands him the second volume, which he has removed from a wall safe. The original title of this cultural touchstone, which comprises three volumes in English, is
Noctes Atticae
. Aulus Gellius wrote it in the second century A.D. while living in Athens. It was obvious that he, who did not care to say any more, was set to go to Patagonia with the fresh clue. I didn't ask him about his pseudonym. But in my latest dream—about as long as an MTV video—I saw you escaping from a novel that he wrote and trying to take shelter in the novel he was about to write …”

I managed to extricate myself from the paranoid book dealer and went back to the hotel and fell into a deep sleep after drinking two beers I found in the mini-bar. Later, as we had dinner in his room, Professor Ali complained about how his enthusiasm for translation had diminished along with his pain. It was a great surprise to me that he bewailed his beloved's disappearance instead of rejoicing at the good news that she was still alive somewhere.

“If she's gone back to Ä°zmir and kept it from me, I couldn't bear it,” he moaned.

“Sir,” I pointed out, “we still have three days to find her. I would prefer to hear such a lamentation from an acknowledged translator of romantic novels when he has to board the plane empty-handed.”

I went back to my room and out onto the balcony, realizing that I had yet to enjoy the view. The haunting darkness that rose up when rush-hour traffic died down grew on me. Between the hotel and the desolate port were the Retiro train station, which was fast approaching retirement, a bus station resembling a dumpster and, the last figure in the frame, a colonial clock tower rearing up like an agitated Trojan horse.

I took it as an omen when the light rain let up. Starting with Leandro Alem, I walked the half-deserted streets interlocked like lines on a chess board. Converting prices on the goods in those dimly lit windows to New Turkish Lira was somehow therapeutic. I observed dignified groups of people rummaging through garbage bins and greeted weary men out walking their dogs. When I got cold while counting the buildings with only one lighted window, I ducked into a bar with lively music. My drinking companions were a retired sailor and a trade unionist who confused Turkey with Estonia. At my next bar a gay antique dealer's invitation to San Telmo was enough to send me scampering home.

In view of the average age of the walking monuments on the morning shift in the crumbling Confitería Ideal I wondered whether it was okay to put in an order. It seemed clear that the hawk-nosed man talking to the eighty-year-old waiter was Dikran the jeweler. As an extra hint, I assumed, he wiggled his shoulder. The way he used his right hand to signal for coffee for the two of us took me back to my days at the Huzur Coffeehouse at L.

“I felt close to this quiet man from Ä°zmir, although they told me that a partnership between a Jew and an Armenian was unheard of even in Ottoman times. But Eli looked like Robert Taylor, and this of course was an advantage when it came to attracting female customers. So I put him downstairs at the cash register. It took only two days to realize that he had the mind of an eighteen-year-old. This lost soul couldn't focus on life, let alone the cash register. If he wasn't diving into youth magazines at his desk, he was doodling sports-car designs. He was well mannered and helpless, so for the sake of his innocent face I never said much. I even accepted the three hours in the middle of the day when he regularly disappeared. I was thankful that he was not a meddlesome guy who put his nose in his partner's business.

“One day I caught him pilfering from the cash register and he grasped my hand and begged me not to say anything about this shameful act to his wife. We took our salaries out of the company profits, and our families didn't socialize with each other, so I didn't find out for a long time that for an eighteen-month stretch they lived solely on his wife's bank account. He convinced her that there were no profits and therefore no salary, so that he could use the money for installments on the sports car he had secretly bought. At that I returned his capital and fired my so-called partner of seven years. Esther, whom any man would consider a prize, was probably sent to Eli as divine retribution. For a while I thought this mismatched couple were victims of love at first sight. If only the fault-finding Stella hadn't been so devoted to her father, Esther might have said to hell with her inheritance and kicked her foolish husband out straightaway.

“She was a woman full of life who radiated joy wherever she went. Chic, intelligent, and well educated, of course she found it easy to make friends with men. Two years after I got rid of Eli she paid a surprise visit to the store, looking as exhausted as a firefighter. She asked what I thought of her husband going into the used-car business. ‘If he has to work, let him do what he knows and likes,' I said, feeling somewhat regretful. The last time I saw her was at Eli's funeral. She still carried herself like a queen though she was on the far side of fifty. I have to be honest—God knows the truth anyway—during the whole funeral I was only thinking about how I would woo her if I were a widower. The only clue I have for you is this old address, and I doubt that it's much use. When we last met she told me they were about to move again; and from the way she sighed it was obvious that it would not be to a more delightful home …”

Seeing me consult my watch, Dikran summoned the waiter, whom I felt like strangling for sneering at him as he asked for the check in Grand Bazaar Spanish. He extracted a yellowing card from his exhausted briefcase, put on his glasses, and flourished his antique fountain pen. He wrote down Esther Arditti's address and blew on it twice. I knew as he handed me the note that he was going to invite me to dinner. I dealt with it by accepting, provided we met in Istanbul at the Taksim monument on Christmas Eve. I walked to the door aware of being followed by the restless gaze of everyone in the establishment.

On the dim street my feet started to lose their feeling and I felt a piercing ache in my forehead. I closed my eyes and tried to grip the earth with my toes. When I opened them again everything around me seemed turned into a scene from a graphic novel. I could hear nothing but the casual fluttering of the puny pigeons' wings. I set my feet in motion along a trail of withered leaves fallen from the tall rickety trees. At precisely the moment when I pulled myself together and began to crush them under my feet I understood that my inner voice had deserted me. My real worry was that it had taken my passion for classical music with it. It occurred to me that I hadn't even so much as hummed Pachelbel's Canon to myself since the day I started chasing after Esther.

I took another taxi to Ariel's bookstore. There I met Sebastiano Valido cracking jokes in his high voice. The old book collector was wearing a cape. “I never set foot outside Argentina, but I can describe Haghia Sophia to you down to the last stone,” he said. Ariel looked at the address I was holding and bestowed on me the honor of pronouncing the word “once”, meaning eleven, correctly as “onsey.” I felt the urge to pull out the last tuft of hair remaining on his head.

We made it to “eleven” in a taxi driven by Rita, an ex-dancer who'd become a driver after breaking her leg. They informed me that this district where middle-class Jews once lived hadn't been able to withstand the vicious cycle of inflation and deflation, a remark that brought to mind the sorrowful back streets of Fatih. In fact, when I saw those miniature synagogues I could hardly convince myself that I wasn't in Balat. It was equally difficult to believe that I was not in Mahmutpaşa when I saw the clumsily scattered rolls of fabric in the lifeless shop windows. We reached the soulless building at 721E Larrea after leaving several gray or beige worn-out and deserted streets behind. Ariel reached for the bell next to “Portería (Jorge S. Perez)” and I stepped back. The salmon-faced doorman seemed to diminish in size as Ariel tucked a fifty-peso bill into his shirt pocket. The Ardittis had lived first on the top and then on the ground floor. According to Perez, who had helped them move to their new place in Paso in the fall of 1980, they were a respectable couple who even during their endless quarrels avoided disturbing the neighbors.