Revenge of the Translator

by Brice Matthieussent

  “Fucking asshole!” David cries. “Where is it anyway, that letter from father Prote?”

  “In the brown envelope, on the side table,” says Doris. “But you’re in for a surprise.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “Actually, it’s Abel who’ll be shocked,” Doris corrects herself with a delighted smile.

  David picks up the brown envelope, takes out a thin bundle of sheets of onionskin paper, then sits back down next to Doris on the crimson sofa. He unfolds the fragile sheets carefully and begins to read.

  * I am also a “floater” just like David and his colleagues. Of course, I don’t change costume every night like Doris and Abel, but every … To the perpetual question “How long does it take for you to translate a book?” I usually respond “Between two days and two years.” So I change costume according this elastic rhythm, I put on the author’s clothing for an eminently variable duration. In reality, I don’t “float” that much, I don’t really forage, I am not a bee buzzing from flower to flower to collect the pollen of texts and turn it into honey, no, I’m more of a Kiwi stuck to the ground, nose glued to the text, probing the dense grass of words with my snout.

  The revenge of the floater is also that of the translator: one text in place of another. Are all floaters out for revenge? (Temp’s Nose)

  INTERMISSION

  *

  * Permettez … Please … Scusi …

  It’s been a long time since I’ve shown myself. But like the razor clam spurting from the sand at high tide, it’s time for me to poke my head out, to emerge, powerful, from my shell. At least three chapters have gone by without you, dear reader, hearing the sound of my voice. I have my reasons: the underground, erotic, epistolary, and passionate tribulations of the characters of Translator’s Revenge both enticed me and made my life difficult. Nevertheless, I’ve made it out okay and for that my author should be thankful. Of course, I redacted things here (a long and tedious philosophical digression by Prote on betrayal), added on there (disguised nights, fellatio in the tunnel), repaired elsewhere (the model of the Super Constellation, whose story was coming unglued), invented from beginning to end the scene of the distorted flower deliveryman, modified Doris’s last name (it was originally Lecerf, the horror! Night suits her much better, plus I’ve always liked the song by Ray Charles, “Night and Day”—feet tapping on the ground, head bobbing left and right, more energetic than the enigmatic head bob of the Indians, left at night, right during the day, unless it’s the other way around). In sum, a few minor retouches and mends, which, as usual, improved the original text. At least I hope. But outside of these minor misdemeanors, I am at your service! (Traitor’s Nuisance)

  Candies, caramels, Eskimo Pies, chocolate! Sodas and cold drinks!

  In an aisle in the now-illuminated room echoing with the saccharine music of the grand piano set up on the stage, I walk along the wall with a rolling gait, slowly go down the carpeted stairs, then pass beneath the silver screen, masked for a few seconds by two heavy red velvet curtains. I approach the pianist in his tuxedo, who, without pausing his soporific melodies on the black and white Pleyel keys, turns to me and winks from behind his sunglasses. Do you recognize me, dear reader? Probably not, for I have changed body and here I am transformed into Verdana, the dashing cinema usherette, bright red skirt falling at mid-calf and full of flounce, fishnet stockings and high heels to emphasize my shapely legs, a tiara encrusted with diamonds decorating my jet-black hair in an updo resembling Sugarloaf Mountain. I’m sporting two leather straps over my flat stomach that hold up the wicker basket full of my sweets. It’s intermission. It’s hot. Up on the cream-white ceiling encircled by a gilded molding, large fan blades slowly stir the air, bluish from cigarette smoke. Air conditioning has not yet been invented. The ban against smoking at the cinema hasn’t been either. It is the beginning of June 1937, in Paris, perhaps in the immense rococo hall of the Rex, on the Grands Boulevards, where spectators fill the plush red seats. From the bottom of the orchestra up to the stage, these rows of identical chairs unfurl toward the large crimson curtains like velvet waves crashing onto the flat beach of the Red Sea, or else like my own lines, sneakily slipped into the bottom of a white rectangle above which there was just moment ago, in size 11 font and henceforth relegated to page 131, the word

  Intermission.

  All these people came to see this spring’s great cinematographic novelty, Love is News, starring Tyrone Power, Loretta Young, and Don Ameche. A film that I adore and never grow tired of rewatching.

  Each time, my size 10 font gets all excited. Especially when the journalist (Tyrone Power) takes in his arms the beautiful heiress (Loretta Young), who faints from happiness and incredulity, I too feel as though I might swoon with happiness.

  As soon as the wall lights and the crystal chandeliers turn back on, the brouhaha gradually invades the theater where once again we can admire the faux fluted columns, the luminous torches embedded in the walls, the basins of painted plaster, the pastel cherubs that frolic on the ceiling. A rumble swells through the overheated space, one can hear conversations, laughter, murmurs, the scratching of matches or the click of someone lighting a cigarette or a cigar, the rhythmic bursts of my own voice—Sam, the pianist, often tells me that I should be a singer—the crumpling of candy wrappers, newspapers, or the leaflet skimmed to pass the time, the squeaking of a few badly-oiled chairs, and soon the joyful cries of children delighted by my appetizing appearance.

  But what strikes me most is the interlaced couples. I love to observe them as soon as the lights come back on, not all at once but little by little, in a slow successive fade, and often they prolong their embrace and their kiss as if the room were still plunged in darkness and no one could see them, their hands continuing to lose themselves in bare skin, beneath skirts, shirts, corsages, in openings and zippers. Not very photosensitive, they take a long time to react, to emerge from their burning, blind cocoon where the only thing bothering them is the inconvenient armrest, understanding at last, intoxicated with love, dazed with sensuality and, for some of them, with frustration, that the vast majority of spectators, far from confusing the cinema with a hotel room, are interested in the images being projected, and that the intermission henceforth spares them from lifting their eyes toward the silver screen only to catch sight of their lustful peers, with varying and sometimes disapproving, even outraged, reactions. So the lovers distance themselves by a few centimeters; haggard and rubicund, they emerge from their underwater trance, their feverish hands straighten their clothes, the myopic wipe their glasses stained with cold cream, they glance nervously around the room, sometimes timid, sometimes furious, as if someone had just brusquely awakened them from a delicious dream or transported them against their will to an unknown place. I adore observing their wide eyes, their gaping mouths, their cheeks red with excitement or from a stubbly beard, while they come back little by little to the world that they never left.

  *

  * Sometimes it’s in that hardly sterling state that I emerge from a translation session; alone, it goes without saying, but just as dazed, similarly disoriented; for a moment unable to find a sense of place, a sense of time, a reason for my presence anywhere other than the intimacy of the text. It’s the intermission, the break: I wrest myself from the words printed on the page and from the fashioning of my own words on the computer screen—the AZERTY keyboard similar to rows of red chairs, or rather to the design of the theater with the seat numbers inscribed in little squares on a document that can sometimes be found tacked to the wall next to the register; my 14.1-inch screen is the immense radiant surface where the film plays out—I wrest myself from this racket as the lover-spectator distances his or herself from the warm body of his or her companion when the lights come back on and paralyze them. A dark room, a paradise of transfixed couples that, for the span of two or three reels, discover, hearts racing, that they are not made for the daylight but for the shadows of the populated abyss of spectral and incomprehen
sible voices, dimly lit by the screen’s shifting gleams. Sometimes I think I’m molding my words in an underwater workshop, holding my breath far below the luminous world, no need to inhale the appearance of things, my only light that of the computer screen and a small beam aimed at a book. When the break comes, my private interlude, my intermission,† I rejoin the visible space, I propel myself to the surface of the world without a single decompression stop. Like a missile spurting forth from a nuclear submarine, I spring into the open air in a large splash, and I recognize nothing. Blinded by the light, not very photosensitive myself, mechanically I walk to the kitchen and make myself a coffee. (Tyuiop N.)

  Sometimes during the screening a man with a feverish gaze or a woman with a hunted look comes to take refuge in the theater. They burst in right in the middle of a screening, sit down wherever, throw furtive glances right and left, survey the doorways so intensely they don’t even watch the film, sometimes change places, several times. Occasionally, several men follow them through the doors, causing a ruckus in the dark room: outraged protest from the spectators, whistles, cries, various threats.

  But to tell the truth I’ve never witnessed such a scene, I’ve only seen it on the movie screen.

  Today, although the theater is packed, it’s an ordinary screening. As usual people assail me to buy sweets and I have plenty of time to observe the amorous couples, victims of luminous electroshock. It’s as if they were going to liquefy, as if the light were going to melt them and make them disappear for good, sucked into their chairs. Nevertheless, between a grandmother buying a pack of candy for her grandson and a hairy man in wrinkled clothing who demands two Eskimo Pies and then immediately turns on his heels without waiting for his change, I notice an elegant man accompanied by a young eccentric beauty. I work part-time as an usherette at the Rex to pay for my studies, but I adore the theater and immediately recognize the young woman: Miss Dolores Haze, whom I saw just the day before yesterday at the Odéon, in a performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Judging by their frenzied gazes, their scarlet cheeks, their almost shameful efforts to straighten their chic clothing, those two are emerging from a serious performance of their own. But who is that elegant gentleman?

  “Candy, caramels, Eskimo Pies!” I yell out, staring at them.

  “Two Eskimo Pies,” the graying man replies immediately, handing me a bill. “Or, actually: two cold drinks!” He then turns toward his companion. “I imagine you’re as thirsty as I am, Lola.”

  I hand them two cold orange juices and add mischievously:

  “Anything for Miss Haze.”

  The aging man gives me a dirty look, then, without a word, vexed that I have recognized the beautiful actress, pays me.

  The lights go out little by little. The two crimson curtains open onto the glimmering screen. Sam, the pianist in the tuxedo and black glasses, disappears into the wings to the left of the stage. The film is about to begin. In the growing shadows, I continue to sell my last Eskimo Pies, my last cold drinks. Summer is almost here, it gets hotter and hotter in the room. The lovers nestle against each other, their hands grope around among their clothing, they prepare to plunge back into their territorial waters. And I go in search of my pianist.

  † In English and in French in the original text.

  Chapter 8

  THE HIDDEN, STOLEN, AND FINALLY REVEALED LETTER

  *

  * Maurice,

  You can call me your Dodo, your Dora, your Dollie, your Lolo, your Lola, your Loli, but never Lolita, it’s much too vulgar. I am Dolores to the government, and to you anything you like, except Lolita. I warned you from the beginning of our relationship, I detest the crackling barrage of syllables in that name evoking a sulking, shameless young girl, syllables that, one night last autumn, you inadvertently or wickedly bestowed on me in New York, then noticing my disgust with a sad surprise. And my anger. I am no longer that adolescent formerly entrusted, after the accidental death of my mother, to the care of a libidinous stepfather who used and abused that regrettable first name as much as he did my pubescent body. I abhor Lolita (with your dirty mind, don’t go mishearing that as: I’m your Lolita! I would never forgive you). No, I am Dolores Haze, American, twenty-seven years old, brown hair, dark blue eyes, five feet six inches tall, distinctive characteristics: none, except for now-developed feminine curves, profession: actress and no longer a nymphet doomed to the concupiscence of an old European man, American actress who has come to Paris thanks to you and because of you to act in a Chekhov play in your famous Odéon theater.

  Dolores Haze, if you would like the French translation of my name, it’s “Douleur Labrume.” I looked it up.

  To celebrate my hundredth performance of The Cherry Orchard last night, you gave me that beautiful violet crown that went straight to my heart. Certain crowns are worn on the head—for example, you are in my eyes the uncontested king of your professional milieu—but I squeezed this circle of violets against my chest, for I saw it as a token of your love for me. I really loved the little cardboard rectangle, pierced by a metallic eyelet and fastened to the violets with a twisted wire, like a tag affixed to a suitcase before a long transatlantic voyage. That fluttering appendage proves your attachment to me. As if I were the violet crown and you, the man of words, linked to me by that wire twist. But contrary to what you probably think, you are not the only one who can write: soon, on its splendid violet backdrop, the floral suitcase will contain nothing other than my own letter folded in half several times and slid into its center. You will find it, or not. That’s luck for you, as said the other. In any event, when you read this letter, I will no longer be here. I will have left the apartment and, I hope, Paris. I will have left you, too. As soon as possible, I will cancel my contract with the Odéon theater.

  I’m sure you’ll understand nothing of it. Too bad for you.

  Enough procrastinating.

  I am writing this letter at four in the morning, the 21, no, the 22 of June. You are sleeping with your fists clenched in your big soft bed, arms rather pathetically stretched toward the place, still warm, where my body rested just a few minutes ago. Now you’re snoring in the bedroom and I’m in the living room. During the party and during the night, we made love several times, in relatively absurd places, as is your tendency: first after the end of the play, when we returned hastily from the Odéon to your mansion via the secret passage to greet your guests—you always had a fondness for sleight of hand, for surprise appearances, jack-in-the-boxes that pop up without warning—on the way you suddenly led me into the wine cellar and there, in the middle of the shelves heavily weighted with vintage wines, some dating from the last century, you took me from behind and, I admit without false modesty, made me come (I’m not telling you anything new, I know, but I derive pleasure from remembering my pleasure in writing). Then, one behind the other, you behind me, both of us in an excellent mood, we went back up the stairs to the hidden door that opens onto the little hallway deserted of guests; and there, at the foot of that hideous puppet fresco, at risk of being seen by your servants, while we could hear the din of your party in full swing two doors down, you kissed me once again, bit my earlobe, caressed me, snaked your hand inside my clothing, then penetrated me while lifting me up against the closed door of the secret passage. Legs spread wide, wrapped around your thighs, while your penis impaled me and your pelvic thrusts made me jump and pant, the whole time I watched that atrocious dislocated puppet above your right shoulder, the fresco that, as you told me one day, you had commissioned a renowned Parisian artist to paint on that large wall a few years ago. Goya always fascinated you. His gruesome works entitled The Disasters of War, which you showed me, are burning topics in Spain, as in this very moment the odious general is wreaking havoc on the country. I also know that you are very interested in my compatriot, the very promising writer Ernest Hemingway. Promising and generous. Involved in the fight against fascism. Ambulance driver in the American army during World War I. Hemingway recently went to Spain i
n the ranks of the Republicans. He’ll go back there, I’m sure of it, and I bet he’ll write about that country and that war. I bet you’ll publish him soon in France, too. But that’s beside the point.

  Getting back to the puppet. The more I stared at him, the more I felt like he had something to tell me. The more violently you moved back and forth inside me, the wider your hands spread my butt cheeks to penetrate me as deeply as possible, the more I felt you were foreign, narcissistic, concerned only with your own pleasure, eyes half-closed, probably focused on the mental image, not yet within reach, that would allow you to heighten your orgasm, perhaps scanning through the pornographic positions collected in your memory, parading one after another on the screen of your private cinema before selecting the one that would excite you enough, experienced masturbator that you are, to come. My body, at the end of the day, held less importance for you than the fetishistic image that would allow you to do the impossible. And the more I stared at the dislocated marionette levitating in the sky above the sea, the more I felt it was staring at me. It was speaking to me. It was my accomplice. My double, perhaps. The two of us were manipulated by forces bigger than us: your body, your dick, your hands, the images, still disappointing, that moved in a slide show beneath your eyelids; and for the marionette, the being or beings that had thrown it into the middle of the sky so that it would crash down over the sea and drown. Spanish Icarus in freefall, captured by surprise in mid-flight, frozen on the wall for years like a bird in a photograph, Abraham’s suspended knife in the Rembrandt painting we saw together at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Yes, that marionette was whispering words to me that I didn’t understand, but that it wanted to communicate to me at all costs.