Bebek Hotel
At a table of Bebek Hotel
his attention divided
between the poems
sad, colloquial, truthful of Oran Veli
and the scandalous beauty of the Bosphorus.
A poet who hated literature
and a landscape that was literature
for anyone who wasn’t a poet.
But a question invaded
his divided attention: what am I doing here,
I who always see the other side of things
when they appear to me?
The music, popular and American,
reminded him of his Portuguese adolescence,
as far from reality as life
can be from the man who bears it.
The boats, assiduous like cars
in a side street of Avenida da Liberdade,
carried everything but a word.
Maybe a word, yes,
not a life in that word.
In Veli’s poem,
which in another language could be called “Suicide”,
he read:
«
I must die saying nothing to no one.
There will be a line of blood at a corner of my mouth.
Those who know me
will say:
“
No doubt he loved someone.”
(…) »
He stopped reading with a smile,
the Turkish language, which doesn’t say the verb
to be, was more familiar to him
than the landscape,
than the people coming and going,
more familiar than the street he’d grown in,
more familiar than the words
in the mouth of the street.
We feel closer
to solitude than to the city.
What am I doing here, he asked,
as if still in Lisbon
and at a loss as to what more to slander,
a friend,
a new book,
politicians,
someone who keeps us entertained in a paper
and judges himself above that,
above men who do nothing but slander.
Sitting at Bebek Hotel,
before the beauty of Istanbul’s women
he didn’t even know how to love his woman.
Soon, the sun
will leave this part of the world.
Time will start here,
for entertainment,
the time of the job will start,
the time of the past will start
at the desk of the young man who pores
at an ancient poem
even if just to later provide
the entertainment or the job.
A life like setting
the alarm clock and waking up with it.
A life like an hotel
that registers its guests
most of the time for nothing,
a life like a woman,
young and beautiful, with whom some one lays
like an hotel.
Veli finished his poem:
«
Those who know me will say,
“
Good for him. Poor man, suffered so much.”
But the true reason should be none of them.»
The Bosphorus, like a prince,
kept all his decorum.
And the gulls, whenever they could,
had fish in their beaks.
The other side of things.
in O Tabaco De Deus, Cotovia, 2002
Translated by Rui Parada