The Interpreter (8 page)
Authors: Diego Marani,Judith Landry
My love,
If I may call you that â once again, I'm writing you a letter, for speaking no longer serves any purpose. I don't even know if you listen to me when I talk to you, or whether you've already flown away on the wings of your impenetrable thoughts. I don't understand what's happening to us. I know, it's my fault. It was all so wonderful, there was no need to say anything. We were so close, we both felt it; and that was enough, or rather so much more than enough. But I wanted to talk, to question you, to know and, by doing so, I ruined everything. Do try to understand: I know nothing about you, I don't know what you do on the other six days of the week. I don't know anything about your hopes, your dreams, whether you're happy or unhappy. I don't know what you think about when you're not with me. I feel that I have a substitute âyou' beside me, someone who resembles you but is not you. The real you will come later, and I and your substitute are here waiting for you and, as we're waiting, we don't know what to say. We look at each other, I smile at you, you tell me fascinating things about strange languages and our meetings are like television documentaries. When we say goodbye, when dusk falls on our afternoon ramblings around the city and I go homewards with a heavy heart, I keep my mind closed tightly as a fist, so that the precious treasure held within it â my rare time with you â cannot escape. Yet when I loosen it a bit, there's nothing there; you've flown away. I thought I had you in my grasp, but you weren't there at all. All that I know of you is what you've let me know: a shell, a voice. All that's left to me of you, when we part, is your voice. I feel alone; the air around me feels cold, there's an icy feeling in my house, in my life. You broadened my mind, made me see worlds I knew nothing of; whichever language you speak, your words enthral. How could one resist the thousand visions that you conjure up before me, the imaginary worlds you set up and inhabit? But there is something false in you, and sometimes I feel that what you are giving me is not yours to give â that you have stolen it from someone and are giving it to me to rid yourself of it, as though it were some kind of proof that could implicate you in some crime. No sooner do I get some hint of you, manage to grasp something that seems authentically you in that shifting mind of yours, than you cast it off and proffer me the empty shell of what you were. I was looking for warmth, friendly affection, more, perhaps; I thought you too valued our Sunday afternoon walks. I thought you needed me, as I did you. But you have need of nothing, of no one, and you treat even yourself with strained detachment, as though you had become bored with yourself and were trying to get away, to slip out of your own head and occupy a new one â a whole new world to be discovered, filled. This is the last Sunday of the season; after that, we won't have any reason to see each other again, unless we seek it out ourselves. We'll nod to one another, and then I'll never see you again. But if you want me to stay, tell me so. With words â your own, for once, not those you pluck from others' mouths. Then all my days will become one of our magic Sundays.
I love you.
Irene
A chasm opened up within me, and I plunged into a black magma which burned my vital organs without filling them. I was breathing from my throat, unable to open my lungs, paralysed by the sheer horrific vastness of my discovery. I tore open the third and last letter, the one dated 20th July, bearing a Zurich postmark.
My cruel friend,
Where have you gone? What has become of you? I've looked for you everywhere. You don't answer the phone; you're not at home, I've been by a thousand times and rung your bell, at every time of day. The concierge was starting to give me funny looks. There's never a light on in any of your windows; I sat outside in the car for one whole night, waiting to see when you'd get back, what you were doing. In the white light of the moon, I imagined rooms I'd never seen; it's only now, after two months of knowing you, that I realise you've never shown me your house. I even started to think that perhaps you didn't live there at all, that the card you'd given me wasn't even yours. I went to look for you at the âEtoile' cinema but they didn't know anything about you either; at the sight of those dark red seats, my heart missed a beat. I asked the cinema manager to let me into the interpreting booths for a moment; in yours, I thought there was still a ghost of your smell. You'll say that that's impossible; it must be because I've still got it in my nostrils, and seeing places where I'd been with you just brought it back. I started to cry. The manager beckoned me to go down again, but I couldn't because I was crying, and when he noticed, he came up and closed the curtain. Please, write to me, tell me where you are, just tell me that you're still alive, goddammit! You've got my address in Zurich, write to me there. I'll be leaving soon, I can't bear to stay in this city any more, it's been poisoned by unbearable memories; even the light of the changing times of day reminds me of you. So at two o'clock I'm in agony because you aren't meeting me in front of the station, at three because we're not strolling through the empty Sunday streets, just you and me, cars parked and cats on windowsills; and then again at four, when I can no longer see you but hear your voice in my head, your voice which speaks so many words, all the world's words, except for those I long to hear. What are you looking for? What ghost are you pursuing, what secret suffering has you on its hook? Or is it you who are in flight? From what, from whom? Are you a murderer who has left gruesome acts behind you? Why don't you tell me about them? Why have you never talked to me of yourself? It is only now that I realise that it's not you I am in love with, but the characters in the films that you translated: a different man each Sunday, because that's all you've ever given me of yourself. So now it's Piotr I'm in love with, perhaps because he was the first, laden with promise, and perhaps because he was the gentlest of them. But Piotr hanged himself, poor bastard! And you're not here, you never have been, you've never existed! In which case, how shall I ever forget you? How can I wipe you out of my mind, you who are the sum of so many absences, the blank mirror in which I seek⦠you, who are nobody, and myself. And who can rid me of myself?
I shall love you forever.
Irene
Irene, my Irene slave to that madman! Now I understood those restless Sundays, the windy afternoons of that fateful spring when I would watch her preparing eagerly for her cinema matinees. I shouldn't have let her go alone, least of all to the foreign season. But who could have known, who could have possibly imaginedâ¦It was all so unbearable that I felt a sudden desire not to believe it. I might have been able to leave that room, go down into the road and cross the little garden as though I had discovered nothing. But those three letters in their yellow envelopes had put a stop to that; rather, what they did was to trigger off new suffering in me. That man was like a maelstrom, sucking anyone who approached him into his vortex; he had swallowed up Irene, inexorably dragging her away from me and then contaminating me too with his own vile evil.
I picked up the letters and stuffed them back into their envelopes, thrusting them into my pocket. Outside, the sky was now becoming covered with low, threatening banks of cloud; inside, too, darkness was gathering, the first raindrops pattering on the dirty windowpanes. The lift started up, and a square of light fell on the table, revealing a thick layer of dust disturbed by the wanderings of my hands. I was on the point of leaving when my eye was caught by a piece of folded paper tucked beneath an ugly glass vase placed in the centre of the table. In the midst of such chaos, the table was the only surface which had been left unencumbered â except for that vase, with that bit of crumpled paper. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a list, written in capitals, with the names of various far distant, scattered cities:
Vancouver
San Diego
Papeete
Vladivostok
Pusan
Taipei
Surabaya
Durban
Eilat
Constanta
Odessa
Klaipeda
Tallinn
Apart from Constanta, Odessa, Klaipeda and Tallinn, the others were all crossed out. I saw those places â so far away, so different â as tracing an unbroken line around the globe, thickening in the Far East and then again in Europe but leaving a vast gap between Surabaya and Durban. Then I realised that it must be an itinerary, some abstruse trail to be followed up. I imagined that, rather than heeding Dr Barnung's warnings and placing himself in his hands, that man had ended up believing his own visions and had hurtled off to those far-flung places in search of the phantasmagorical language whose existence his madness had summoned into being. He had visited them one by one, striking them off his list; the only ones left to visit were Constanta, Odessa, Klaipeda and Tallinn. I remembered his study course: Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian, four of the few languages with which he was as yet unacquainted and which he had perhaps gone to seek out, following his own crack-brained theories. I imagined him drinking his fill of words which his famished mouth was learning to savour; at each new one he uttered, I saw his own appearance shifting, a kaleidoscope of masks. I was tempted to think that perhaps that man was one of many, that I had encountered just one, but that there were hundreds of others like him, pursuing one another, wandering round the globe, usurping voices and faces not their own, leaving a trail of old clothes, shoes and mineral water bottles strewn behind them, as in that flat: the indecipherable armoury of madness. I decided that I would root him out from wherever he was hiding: no longer to help him, or to pool our sufferings, but rather to witness the course and climax of his madness for myself. My heart full of glee, watching him as he gasped, racked by spasmodic seizures, I would tell him that soon all his languages would crumble away and dissolve into one rank mush. Secretly, though, I sensed that it was not just the poisonous desire for vengeance that was driving me towards him. No, something stronger was at work, something I was trying to hold in check within my mind: some frightening affinity, some inexplicable and voluntary attraction which I was trying to resist with all the strength that I could muster. I felt a physical need to sense him at my side, to hear his voice, to smell the bitter odour he gave out, as though he were at once cause and cure of all my woes.
Sensing that it was late, I shook off these thoughts; by lingering on such fantasies, I too was running the risk of going mad. The evil blossoming in the soft reaches of my mind might overwhelm me; if I wished to avoid the fate awaiting the interpreter, I would have to shuffle off such crazed woolgathering; I would have to set about finding a cure and close up the dangerous wound which was cleaving me in twain.
Throwing a few clothes at random into a suitcase, I left one morning in late September. Heavy of heart, I looked back through the darkness at my house from a rise in the road. Would I ever be seeing it again? Would I ever go back to tend my roses, would I ever return to my old reassuring groove? At that moment, all seemed to be lost forever. The plane to Munich was almost empty; the autumn sun fell glancingly through the little windows and, as I slumped into my seat, I remembered the peaceful hours of distant afternoons, punctuated by the untroubled hum of radiators and warmed by the busy presence of Irene. I had the brief sensation that what I was embarking on was utterly absurd, that in reality my illness was pure fiction, that it had all been a passing frenzy brought on by loneliness. I was going to lock myself up among lunatics, I was putting myself into the hands of a neurologist who was eccentric to say the least, submitting myself to a course of treatment about which I knew precisely nothing. But suddenly, at that very moment, uncontrollable whistling and gurgling noises sprang from my mouth, truncated words pronounced in a voice which was not my own, while my neighbour looked at me in alarm, then hid his face behind his quivering newspaper. I wanted to cry out, to call for help, to tell someone about the fearful ill that was devouring me. I tried to catch the hostess's eye as she passed by with the drinks trolley; she had strong hands and her face was strangely lined, as though she had slept on a rumpled sheet; her lips and eyelids were smeared with oily make-up. She looked at me severely, as though she had noticed my lapse and wanted to reproach me for it. For a moment, I had the absolute conviction that I was part of some vast and faultlessly orchestrated set-up, that the hostess herself was a nurse working for Dr Barnung, deputed to work on this specific plane and on no other; those hard eyes of hers, those gnarled hands, those strange wrinkles were all designed to strike fear into me, the kind of fear that renders animals docile as they are herded into the abattoir. I drank my fruit juice obediently and bent my head in resignation. I fell into sleep as though into a swoon. In my dreams, Dr Barnung was cackling, laying his gnarled, clasped hands upon the table while, behind him, the window overlooking the garden lit up with a strange glow.
âI see that you've settled for the wiser course!' he noted, ushering me into his study. âYou'll see â you won't regret your choice. This place is made for you; you'll soon be right as rain.' At that moment, a thin woman came into the room, wearing a long white coat revealing only forearms and calves hairless as eggs; sheathed as it was in thin yellow stockings, her skin had something sickly about it, and for me that colour instantly became a smell â of a dried-up wound, an antiseptic ointment. The woman gave me a slightly servile smile, like that of maid to master, then gestured sharply towards the door she had left half-open behind her.
Escorted by the nurse, I went down long, white-painted corridors where total silence reigned; a smell of the schoolroom wafted from such few doors as had been left open, and I caught a glimpse of listening stations shielded by insulating panels, with rows of headphones hanging from hooks. The floors were covered in soft linoleum which sank beneath my feet as I walked. We went up to the third floor and through a door bearing a notice with the words
Deutsche Abteilung
. My room gave onto an inner courtyard with a small square lawn crossed by little gravel paths; the furnishing was simple but carefully chosen, all in light wood. The nurse opened a cupboard door and handed me a set of sheets and towels; then, after looking me up and down, she started rummaging among the coathangers until she found a blue uniform which she then laid out on the bed, attaching a small strip of red material to the press studs on the pocket.
