by Nazli Eray
“My eye. What an amazing thing! A diamond that shows life to me.
“But now it seems I’m losing that diamond!” I said. I took him by the hands. I cried out with my last bit of hope.
“Help me, Don Luis! Help me. Light flashes . . . flies buzzing around . . . A person could go crazy.
“I may never be able to see the night again. Lit up screens, the faces I love, cities . . . moonlight. The worlds inside books . . .”
Tears were pouring from my eyes. A little light flashed again inside my eye.
“They can fix that,” said Buñuel.
“How?” I cried. “How?”
I was inside a nightmare. I didn’t know what to do. Every once in a while a slight waterfall of light flowed across my eye. I fled from the spots raining down and got myself out into the corridor. Like someone trying to escape a fire. I was struggling to breathe. Those spots of soot were in my eye; I couldn’t get away from them.
Suddenly I realized in horror that this wasn’t a dream. I was in the real world. Buñuel had disappeared.
I went back into my room. My hair was clinging to the back of my neck from sweat. I had to calm down.
“Relax,” I said to myself. “Be calm. Nothing’s going to happen.”
I drank a glass of water.
“You’ll get out of this. Be calm. Don’t panic. Don’t panic when it flashes. It might pass.”
I was covered with sweat. I gradually stretched out on the silk pillows. I was afraid to close my eyes.
I turned my head to one side a little. I was praying that morning would come quickly. The flashes in my eye were gradually decreasing. The waterfall of light flowed across my eye again. It was diminished this time.
“I wish it were morning,” I was thinking. “Just let it be morning right away. I’m so afraid, I can’t close my eyes now.”
“Where are you, Don Luis?” I shouted. He slowly emerged from behind the curtain.
“Well, you know everything now,” I said.
He nodded.
“I know,” he said.
“I fled and came here, to Mardin. A person alone in Mardin. Looking at Mesopotamia.”
“You’re not alone,” said Buñuel.
“I don’t want to think about that!” I forced myself to whisper. “I came here to forget about all of these things.”
“You will forget . . .”
“But will I get better?” I asked. “I wonder if it will go away?”
He nodded.
“You will get better.”
“Make a movie about the retina,” I said.
I was exhausted.
“I made a film about the pupil,” he said. “With Salvador Dali. A pupil being cut. People couldn’t watch it. It’s almost morning, rest a little.”
“Don Luis,” I said. “You know everything. You’ve learned all my worries, my fears.”
“Yes, I did,” he said.
“Please,” I said. “Please don’t reveal them to anyone else.”
“I won’t tell a soul,” he said. “These are your worries, your fears.”
I was crying.
“Don’t cry. It’s not good for your eye,” said Buñuel.
He was telling the truth. There was a little flash in my eye again.
“Being blind is like being dead,” I said.
“That’s the way you feel now,” he said. “It’s a state of mind. You’re going through something.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m afraid. Very afraid. Why did I have this dream? A nightmare.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” said Buñuel.
I looked straight at him.
“How do you know?”
“You lived this,” he said. “It’s real. I watched you from outside.”
“Really?” I said, despondently. “I wish it had been a dream.”
“You’re better now,” said Buñuel. “Relax, try to sleep. There’s still time till morning.”
“What if my eye flashes?”
“Let it flash, nothing’s going to happen,” said Buñuel.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Don’t fixate on it,” he said. He was preparing to leave.
“Sleep,” he said.
He left the room and went out.
STARK NAKED
It was as though Buñuel had stripped me stark naked and left me lying there on the bed. That was how I felt when he pulled open the door and left the room.
Stark naked.
He had discovered my whole soul, my subconscious, my fears, the worries that I hide in the dark cavern of my chest. I was calmer now.
I had relaxed a little.
I slowly went to bed, stretching out on the white bedspread. I watched the first rays of morning light come in through the gap in the curtains for a while.
I had passed the night in Mardin sleepless and naked. A night alone with the flashes in my left eye, my endless worries, my fear. A night different from other nights . . . the night that the famous Spanish director Luis Buñuel came into my dreams and saw me in fear, weeping, nude.
A strange Mardin night. The back of my eye had calmed down now. I would never forget the nightmare that I experienced that night. I didn’t know whether it was real or a dream.
I heard a light footstep. The Black Rose of Halfeti had come. She had her hair gathered behind her neck. She looked very beautiful.
“What happened?” she asked me. “Your face is dead white. Did something happen?”
“Is my face white?”
“You look very pale.”
“Luis Buñuel came last night. He asked me something odd. He told me he wanted to come into my dream.”
“That’s so interesting,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti.
“I closed my eyes. I felt a heaviness. I drifted off. Just then something terrifying happened. When I opened my eyes a little, lightning started to flash in my eye and black dots like soot began to rain down. I knew what this was. It was the onset of blindness. I began to cry. Buñuel comforted me. He told me not to be afraid. I told him about my eye and the flashes. He calmed me down. He saw my subconscious anxieties and fears,” I said.
“Very intriguing,” said the girl. “How is your eye now?”
“Just fine. It calmed down. There’s nothing wrong.”
“Forget what you experienced,” said the girl. “It was just a bad dream.”
“It seemed real to me.”
“Don’t dwell on it. I don’t think it was real,” she said.
I felt calm now. I washed my face and hands and combed my hair.
“Buñuel has a film like that,” I said. “His first film. An eye gets sliced with a lancet.”
“See, that’s why you had that upsetting dream. A nightmare,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti.
“Well, whatever, let’s forget it,” I said.
I had pulled myself together. I was ready to go out into the world again.
THE NIGHT SALON
Morning tea for the old men had arrived. They were talking to one another as they sipped their tea.
“It’s light outside . . .”
“Thank goodness our eyes are open for another day.”
“Now that you mention the word, my eye has a tick every now and then,” said Hıfzi Bey.
“Do you have black dots flying around?” asked the old doctor.
“Yeah. They drive me crazy.”
“That means the vitreous liquid has separated.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Nothing. It’ll go away in a while.”
“Well, that would be good.”
“Does it happen a lot?”
“Well, once in a while . . . It’s like a flash of lightning.”
“Let’s wait and see,” said the doctor.
Then Şevki Bey said:
“And I don’t hear anything in my left ear anymore.”
There was a silence.
“If we get the years we haven’t lived back, all th
is will get taken care of,” said the doctor.
“Right,” muttered Hıfzi Bey. “If we just get those years back, there’ll be nothing wrong with us. We’ll all be fit as a fiddle.”
Şevki Bey said:
“The first thing I’m going to do is go to Kızılay. Just stroll over to Kızılay.”
“If you can get there, of course,” said Mustafa Bey. “There’s a haze. Something unclear somewhere . . . Like a kind of light mist . . . Like the fog on the road in springtime. That will go away, won’t it?” he asked.
“Of course it will,” said the doctor. “What is it, for God’s sake, that cloudiness, that place where everything is just sort of unclear? What is it, for God’s sake?”
“That’s the lock to our brain,” said Mustafa Bey. “That’s just what we’re going to open.”
“The lock to our brain,” murmured the doctor.
THE LOCK OF THE SOUL (THE PULL OF THE GRAVE)
I was going into the dream of the old doctor. The Black Rose of Halfeti came rushing to my room and told me that she wanted to say something very important to me in the old doctor’s dream.
“Wait,” I said. “I’m getting dressed. My hair’s a mess. I must have had a flea crawl on me last night; my neck is itchy.”
The girl leaned over and looked.
“There’s no flea or anything,” she said. “You have an allergy to that silver necklace you’re wearing.”
“Wait, I’ll take it off.”
I quickly removed the necklace and got ready.
“Should I put something over my shoulders? What’s it like inside the dream? Ankara’s cool,” I said to the Black Rose of Halfeti.
“They say it’s raining in Ankara, but I don’t know whether that would come out in the dream,” the girl said.
I wrapped a silk scarf around my neck and put on my deep red lipstick.
“Okay, let’s go, I’m ready,” I said.
Shortly afterward we were inside the passageway. I noticed there were a lot of unusual kinds of women in the passageway; some of them were smoking cigarettes, some of them had taken out mirrors from their purses and were powdering their faces and giving us a look as they passed by.
“We’re going into the old doctor’s dream, right?” I asked.
“As far as I know,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti. “That’s what they said on the phone.”
I bent over to her ear, slowly. “These women are in line for the same dream. They’re not Turks.”
The Black Rose of Halfeti now scrutinized the unusual women all around us.
“They’re Latinas,” she said.
Most of them were young. There were four of five women in the passageway. Most of them would be considered pretty. They were like wildflowers.
We had come up to the cockpit.
A shiny, moist snakeskin covered the entrance to the cockpit. It was swaying slightly. The thing was alive. I suddenly realized that it was one of the most terrifying and at the same time one of the most attractive things I had ever seen. It was an erotic image. Spellbinding. It bore no resemblance to that kind of faded colored cloth that had covered the cockpit the other times.
The Black Rose of Halfeti, next to me, screamed:
“That’s the door to Buñuel’s dream! That weird snake. That pulls a person in like a magnet. That’s the door to his dream.”
The female attendant was standing at the cockpit.
“Whose dream are we going to go into now?” I asked.
“Luis Buñuel’s dream,” said the young woman.
“Oh my God, has there been some mix up? Weren’t we supposed to go into Dr. Ayhan’s dream?”
The woman looked at the screen next to her.
“Dr. Ayhan is awake at the moment,” she said. “You were called for this dream. You know, don’t do anything extreme in there. Try to speak in a low voice . . . the dream is crowded . . .”
“Who all is there?” I asked out of curiosity.
“Women who have been in and out of Luis Buñuel’s life both now and in the past, some starlets, some extras he liked, a leading lady. A young nun from the Catholic church . . . That’s the kind of group that’s in there tonight,” she said.
I slowly pulled the moist snakeskin aside and, brushing slightly against this slimy curtain, slipped inside. The Black Rose of Halfeti came after me.
We were on a dark road.
The cypress trees extending up toward the sky on either side off the road cut off the light, and there were some things swirling around on the creepy stone path in front of us, like little clouds with spider webs in them drifting around in a person’s eyeball.
“What are these things that I’m seeing in front of my eyes?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said the young woman.
We were walking on a long, narrow path in an old graveyard.
I had an enormous sense of fear and melancholy.
The sounds of a religious service came to us from a great distance, perhaps emanating from a church door that was left ajar.
“I feel the cold hand of death touching me,” I said. “Let’s run.”
The Black Rose of Halfeti and I started to run in this old, weird cemetery.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“This is how you get into Buñuel’s dream,” the young woman said. “Maybe it’s a graveyard from his childhood.”
There were two dried flowers in the lap of a mournful statue of a woman. It was obvious they had been left there a long time ago. The colors were faded, and they lay there like old moth wings. We turned right at the statue and began to run with all our might. Suddenly we came to a flat place. A glaring white spotlight caught us and illuminated us. The light was blinding.
“Don’t look at the spotlight! Run to the side!” a voice shouted.
We managed to escape from the white light and run off to the side.
Bang! We smacked into a bed. It was a wooden bed enclosed by Bordeaux-colored velvet curtains and a net. I saw Buñuel inside. He was leaning back against silk and velvet cushions, staring at us.
“Come in,” he said.
We dashed over and flung ourselves on this unusual bed that looked like a board. The goose down mattress was unbelievably comfortable; the last time I had felt so comfortable at night was in a hotel where I had stayed in Moscow. I thought of that for a minute. The bed in the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Outside the lit-up Moscow night . . .
Buñuel said:
“Come over here next to me.” He put one or two of the velvet cushions behind our backs.
“Your bed is incredible!” I said.
“It’s from a set,” said Buñuel. “It’s from a set from one of the films about the bourgeoisie. It’s very comfortable. I really like this netting and these velvet curtains.”
The Black Rose of Halfeti was in Buñuel’s arms now. Buñuel slowly kissed her on the lips.
“Where is this, Don Luis?” I asked.
“Madrid,” he said.
The women we had seen in the passageway came in.
“There he is!” called out a girl with long red curls and black net stockings on her long legs.
She was pointing at Buñuel.
The women had all gathered around the bed emitting little excited screams. The net curtain opened a little. They were looking inside curiously at Buñuel and at us. One of the women started to scream.
“You cheated on me! I didn’t forget that night in Mexico. You cheated on me!”
“Quiet, Maria!” said Buñuel. “Please be quiet. Don’t make me regret calling you. Look, I wanted to see you. We’re friends.”
“Friends? What friends? I’m no friend of yours!” the woman shouted. “First Silvia Pinal, then Maria Felix. So now you’re with this piece of trash?”
She was staring at the Black Rose of Halfeti.
Suddenly she took a gun out of her black patent leather purse and pointed it at Buñuel.
The other women started to scream.
The woman
pulled the trigger.
We heard a deafening noise. Somewhere a window slammed shut. I looked at Buñuel; he had fallen back on the velvet cushions, covered with blood.
The Black Rose of Halfeti began to shriek a series of screams.
The women were all over the place. Maria began to run with the gun in her hand. She opened a door, ran outside, and disappeared from view.
The Black Rose of Halfeti was bent over Buñuel. She was sobbing.
“She murdered him! Murdered him!”
I was next to Buñuel. Slowly I raised his head. He opened his eyes. His face was filled with pain.
“He’s hurt,” I said. “We have to get him to a hospital right way. He’s losing blood.”
“Help!” the Black Rose of Halfeti was shouting. “Help! Call an ambulance!”
At the same time she was holding Buñuel’s head in her lap.
“You will survive!” she whispered. “You’ll survive, Luis.”
The pillows were covered in blood. Buñuel’s face was chalk white.
“Where is the wound?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti.
We didn’t know what to do.
The giant of Spanish cinema, the incomparable genius, was dying in the arms of the Black Rose of Halfeti.
“Ambulance,” I started to shout. “Call an ambulance. Quickly! He’s losing blood.”
A worker from the set was hurriedly saying some things into the phone. He was in a panic. He hung the black Bakelite phone up.
“I told them,” he said.
The women had vanished. We heard the ambulance siren in the distance. It was gradually getting closer. The siren was so powerful it could burst your eardrums.
“Don’t touch him . . .”
“They’re here . . .”
The Black Rose of Halfeti was crying. “I love you. I love you.”
The ambulance had arrived.
Three ambulance workers carefully lifted Buñuel up from the bed and placed him on the stretcher on the floor.
“He’s lost a lot of blood. Let’s give him a transfusion . . .”
“The bullet went in from the shoulder.”
They were talking among themselves. A light began to flash on the ceiling.
“The exit light is flashing,” I said to the Black Rose of Halfeti.
“I can’t leave him like this!” she shouted.