When I got up the next morning I had a sore the size of a baby aspirin on the tip of my tongue. Just drinking water was painful. Actually this was the first time the condition had surfaced since I’d made up with my mother. Now I felt stunned, like a victim running into his torturer again. It was probably because of shame over a move seriously unbecoming a chess master. If sending a syrupy melodramatic message to a woman newly met was what was called love, well, I could deal with that. Besides, I had a ready-made excuse for why I could not seduce women. It was because my forefathers married according to order; that is, if somebody caught their eye they only had to issue an order, and voilá! With this sentence I suppose I’ve accounted for why I hired expensive whores for my lovemaking. If Karacaoğlan were in my place he would say something like, ‘We had nobility when we set out / But we lost it on the way.’ I had to smile. I decided to drop in on Elsa in Venice. I hoped that she would say, ‘So are you an unmitigated blockhead, or what?’ when she heard what had happened to me.
