The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (25 page)

“Elvira Montalban,” I said promptly. “You know, the Argentinean novelist?”

“Yes, I
think
I’ve heard of her,” he said, impressed by my conviction.

But someone else in the building must have told him that I was living there on my own, because the next time I saw him, he avoided me.

Occasionally, I would go to lectures at the Nordic House. One evening I saw that an American researcher would be reporting in English on a study he’d done on S.A.D.—Seasonal Affective Disorder. I went, as usual, in a state of some dishevelment. When I stood up at the end to ask my question, I noticed that my voice was rusty with disuse, and also, that I had a Spanish accent.

“Why do you start from the assumption that S.A.D. is bad?” I demanded. “In some cultures, being depressed is considered the norm and the good.”

“What cultures are these?” the researcher asked with interest, but then someone explained to him that I was just some crazy South American woman, and he went on to the next question.

I stared at my nailbitten fingers in surprised shock.

I had become Elvira Montalban.

In February, I returned to London and to Nicola’s house, and turned the completed manuscript in to Farquharson and Pendergast. Although Jane still complained that the translation read a bit awkwardly in places, she was generally quite impressed with the story—and even more with the mystery of the whole thing. She had me out to dinner at a little place in Soho and tried to pump me for more information about Elvira, but I kept my head. I didn’t even respond to Jane’s rather too-friendly embrace at the end of the evening. She was the sort of well-bred English girl I simply couldn’t feel comfortable around. Nicola knew her from some charity work and said she was horribly snobbish.

Besides, there was Pendergast, and Nicola said
she
was even worse.

The Academy of Melancholy
appeared that autumn and was immediately hailed as a work of great gravity and importance.

“A Metaphorical Descent Into the Abyss of Argentinean Politics,” said
The Guardian
. “A beautiful and terrifying evocation of terror and exile,” wrote the
Times
reviewer. “The author [cribbing here from the publicity materials], resident in one of the Northern countries, splashes the colors of the tropics across the frozen wastes.” “Chilling,” said the
Telegraph
. (A partial quote.) And, my favorite, “Brilliantly translated by Cassandra Reilly.” Farquharson and Pendergast had gotten a friend of theirs to blurb it. “The most interesting book [besides my own] I have read in the last ten years,” wrote Gillian Winterbottom. High praise indeed.

I knew that I would be hearing from Luisa. And I did.

“
Who
is this Elvira Montalban?” she wrote, from her residency at the University of Iowa. “What does it mean, ‘resident of a Northern country’? I have never heard of her. Someone here read it and says we have a similar style. I don’t think so at all. Who publishes her in Spain or Argentina? What is the Spanish name of this book and where can I get a copy?”

After the reviews, invitations to appear on panels and to attend conferences began to pour in for Elvira. The book was published in America, where it made an even greater stir. More offers poured in, and more hysterical letters from Luisa, demanding to know I was not abandoning her for this new writer. Jane referred all requests for interviews and appearances to me, and I referred them, with great regret, to the trash receptacle.

Elvira’s fame would plummet like a stone if it were revealed that she was really an Irish-Catholic girl from Kalamazoo, Michigan.

About nine or ten months after
The Academy of Melancholy
first appeared in England, Jane called me. I had been in and out of London, travelling to see friends and pick up work of course, but also to avoid Luisa, who had made two trips to England specifically to track me down.

“I asked you repeatedly about the rights situation, Cassandra,” Jane fumed. “And you said she didn’t want to be published in Spain or Argentina.”

“That’s absolutely true,” I said, prepared to defend my position again. “She’s writing under a pen name and she’s afraid of repercussions.”

“Then how do you account for the fact that the book has just been published in Madrid?”

“Madrid? Impossible!” I sputtered. “Completely impossible. Elvira doesn’t…I mean, she could never, I mean, she would never
allow
…”

“Elvira not only allowed it,” Jane snapped. “She’s promoting it like crazy. She’s not only alive and well, but she’s not living in Reykjavík. She’s living in Madrid. And her face is all over the literary pages of Spain’s newspapers. It’s a face that, I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, you claimed she refused to have photographed.”

“Face? Photograph? It must be a joke. I told you, she’s reclusive and practically certifiable.”

“Don’t toy with me, Cassandra.” And Jane rang off.

A short time later, a messenger arrived at my door with an envelope from Jane. It contained a batch of clippings from the Spanish newspapers. The face, long, narrow, with heavily made-up eyes, looked completely unfamiliar. I raced through the reviews and interviews, looking for some clue.

“I always wanted to write,” she said in one. “But I never believed that my experiences in Iceland would be any use to me. I thought that to write I would have to write directly about the situation in Buenos Aires, and
that
I thought I could never do.”

“What changed your mind?” the reporter asked.

“A conversation I had with a stranger some years ago in a cafe,” said the false Elvira. “She seemed so fascinated in my descriptions of the snow and the great sadness of that time in my life, that I tried to see what I could make of it.”

The liar, the worse-than-plagiarizer, the
thief
.

She wasn’t Elvira Montalban. She was Maria Escobar. I remembered her now.

It had been a chance encounter in a cafe in Paris some years ago. An intriguing but not particularly attractive woman, wearing, although it was spring and getting warmer, a half-length jacket. A jacket of rather soiled sheepskin. When she took it off, her dress was surprisingly chic, but also rather soiled, with permanent stains under the arms. She was between forty and fifty, with dyed black hair in a heavy bun, no earrings or other jewelry. She sat at a table outdoors that afternoon, sheltered from the wind. A familiar place. The waiter seemed to know her, but not to like her particularly. Once or twice when she spoke to him, he ignored her for the second it took to let her know she was unimportant to him, and then, “
Oui, Madame
?” And this, too, seemed familiar. She was not insulted. She seemed to expect it. A foreigner in some way, yet her French was excellent.

She took out a portfolio of papers, and two or three small dictionaries, and began to work. I understood immediately. She was a translator. Back and forth her eyes scanned, and her writing was rhythmic and assured. Occasionally she looked up a word, but for the most part it seemed routine work, and not particularly engaging.

Eventually I struck up a conversation with her, in French that quickly turned to Spanish, that was restrained at first, and then more voluble. I had the sense she had not talked with anyone for a long time, and certainly not about her life. She was from Argentina, had spent a time in prison there and had gotten out with the help of Amnesty International, which had sent her to Denmark. There she had married an Icelandic businessman who had taken her back to his country. She didn’t live in Reykjavík any longer. They had divorced; for some years she had lived in Paris. She had some work that was fairly unsatisfying in a multinational corporation translating back and forth from Spanish to English to French. Documents of some sort. I remember how her long fingers, with their unkempt nails, fiddled nervously with the papers. Several times she told me that she had a deadline the next day. And yet she made no move to leave.

Nor did I. The waiter ignored us. We let our conversation roam. I listened a great deal, watched her face. Her lipstick was an old-fashioned shade of burgundy and had flaked dryly at the corners of her mouth. She had a faint mustache. She seemed a woman with her life behind her. “I wanted so much more for myself once,” I remember her telling me, and the words floated up in the spring evening air, for twilight had supplanted afternoon.

“What did you want?”

“To write,” she said.

“Everybody wants to be a writer,” I said. “I’ve often thought of it myself, being a translator.”

“But I really wanted it,” she told me.

We kissed when we parted and promised to keep in touch, but I was on my way from Paris to Mozambique to visit a friend, and I lost her card almost immediately.

I had not thought of her again, until I saw her photograph in the newspaper.

The cheek of it. Those stories she told me that day long ago were nothing like what I’d written. Or were they? In truth, I had forgotten the substance of what she’d told me. I only remembered the cafe, the waiter, the scent of spring, the way she tapped the papers under her fingers.

But she wasn’t going to get away with this. Jane would make sure I never worked as a translator again in England or America, if I didn’t get a handle on this and fast.

I called my local bucket shop and got a flight that same evening for Madrid.

Life in Spain, and especially Madrid, doesn’t really get going until around midnight, so even though it was after ten when my friends Sandra and Paloma met me at the airport, they told the taxi driver to head into the center, to the Puerto del Sol. First, for old times’ sake, we did the rounds of half a dozen bars. In some we had a
pincho
, a mouthful, and in others a
racíon
, a plateful. Squid, octopus, shrimp—all fine with me, though I drew the line at tripe and recognizable parts of pigs. We drank a little red wine at each place and then moved on. Eventually we had dinner, and afterward joined the throngs of Madrileños, jamming the sidewalk cafes and narrow streets. It was a May night, warm but not too hot, and it seemed perfectly normal to be wandering around a large city at three a.m. without a fear in the world. We finished up the evening with a Guinness at an Irish bar Sandra and Paloma had recently discovered.

At four we took a taxi to their modern new apartment building far into the suburbs. Sandra and Paloma had come up in the world. When I first knew them, Sandra was on leave from the University of York, writing her dissertation on Women in Nineteenth-century Madrid, and teaching an English class at the university; and Paloma was a struggling scriptwriter. Now Sandra was a professor here and Paloma worked on a hugely successful television show called
¿Quién sabe dónde?
or
Who Knows Where?

“It’s just a missing person show,” Sandra explained, as Paloma popped a tape of a recent show in the VCR, “but somehow it’s tapped into the national psyche. Everybody watches it religiously.”

“I write the scripts,” said Paloma. “I have a lot of fun. Of course it’s all supposed to be completely true.”

The video showed a distraught mother on the phone to her daughter, pleading with her to come home. Strangely enough, a film crew seemed to be right in the mother’s pink-and-blue bedroom with her, as well as in the disco where her daughter was shouting, “I hate you, I’ll never come home!” into the receiver.

¿Quién sabe dónde?
reminded me of Maria Escobar, the word thief. Who knew where she was, indeed? I’d told Sandra and Paloma I was in Madrid to meet with the author of
La academia de la melancholía
, but I hadn’t told them the whole story.

“Yes, that book is very well-known,” they told me. “The author seemed to come out of nowhere and is a great success. We have a copy if you’d like to read it.”

“Oh just leave it around,” I said casually. But as soon as they were in bed, I grabbed it and spent the rest of the night reading
La academia de la melancholía
. The same plot, the same characters, the same mood. Everything the same. Except the words. The Spanish was excellent, beautiful, much better than my original Spanish had been, the Spanish I’d written down those snowy mornings well over a year ago in Reykjavík. How could that be? This was a translation of my work from English. But it read as though it was the original Spanish.

Saturday night we went out on the town again, and Sunday we drove to a small village outside the city to visit Paloma’s mother. Paloma might be a high-rolling, chain-smoking TV executive during the week, but on Sundays she wore a plain dress and flat shoes and helped her mother make dinner.

On Monday I called Elvira Montalban’s publishing house and requested a meeting with the author. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” the receptionist said. “Our authors don’t have time to meet with readers.”

“But I’m her…English translator. I came especially from London to meet her.”

“In that case, I’ll see what I can do.”

She rang back in fifteen minutes to say that Elvira had agreed to meet me the following day for lunch. “She’s looking forward to it,” the receptionist told me.

The restaurant where Maria-Elvira suggested we meet was a typical mesón, a dimly lit inn with a wood oven, a tile floor, and oak beams. The specialties of such places were offal dishes and a chickpea-chorizo stew, known as
cocido
.

I had plenty of time to study the menu and mull over the predilection of Madrileños for brains and intestines and stomach linings, not to mention pig trotters, ears, and even snouts. Maria-Elvira was late, so late that I thought she wasn’t going to show. When she finally appeared, I was amazed at the change in her. She looked elegant and well-dressed, no longer with her hair bundled up and her make-up too thick, no longer wearing clothes that seemed wrong somehow. Her face was still long, her brows still heavy, but her hair was fashionably cut and streaked and her lips were a luscious shade of crimson. She made her way over to my table with determined grace, a woman who had found her role.

“Well,” she said in Spanish. “We meet again, my friend.” She kissed my cheek lightly, as if we were great pals.