Three - Me

  When I was four, my brother, then six, started school, and over the next two years the intense ambivalent companionship that had built up between us began to fade. I was free of our rivalry and of the oppression of his superior strength; now that I had the Pamuk Apartment and  my mother's undivided attention for the entire day, I grew happier, discovering the joys of solitude.

  While my brother was at achool I'd take his adventure comics and, guided by my recollections of what he'd read to me, "read" them to myself. one warm and pleasant afternoon, I'd been put to bed for my daily nap but finding myself too animated for sleep, I turned to an issue of Tom Mix, and soon I felt the thing my mother called my "bibi" going hard. I was looking at a picture of a half-naked redskin with the thinnest of strings around his waist and, draped over his groin like a flag, a piece of straight white cloth with a circle drawn at its center.

 

 

 

 

 

  Another afternoon, as I was lying under the covers in my pajamas talking to a bear I'd owned for some time, I felt the same hardening. Curiously, this strange and magical event--which, though pleasurable, I felt compelled to conceal-occurred just after I told my bear, "I'm going to eat you!" But it wasn't owing  to any great attachment to this bear: I was able to produce the same effect almost at will, just by repeating the same threat. It happens that  these were the sords that made the greatest impression on me in the stories my mother told me--"I am going to eat you!"--which I understood to mean not merely to devour but to annihilate.  As I was later to discover, the daevas of classical Persian literature--those terryfying tailed monsters who were related to devils and jinns and frequently painted by miniatures--became giants when they found their way into tales told in Istanbul Turkey. I got my image of a giant from the cover of an abridged version of the classic Turkish epic Dede Korkuk. Like the  redskin, this particular giant was half naked, and to me he looked as if he ruled the world.

  My uncle, who around this same time had purchased a small film projector, would go during the holidays to the local photography shop, where he rented film shorts: Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Laurel and Hardy. After ceremoniously removing my grandparents' portraits, he would screen the films on the white wall above the fireplace. In my uncle's permanent film collection there was a Disney film he showed only twice; this short run was on account of me. The film featured a primitive, heavy, retarded giant who was as gib as an apartment; when chased Mickey Mouse into the bottom of a well, the monster tore the well from the ground with one sweep of his hand and drank from it like a cup; just as Mickey fell into his mouth, I would cry with all my might. There's painting by Goya in the Prado called Saturn Devouring His Son in which a giant thrusts a little man he has scooped from the ground into his mouth, and it terrifies me to this day.