Revenge of the Translator

by Brice Matthieussent

  On the verge of finally grasping its message, I suddenly heard you whisper in my right ear: “Lo … li … ta.” At that very moment, I no longer had the least desire to make love. I couldn’t believe my ears: I had told you several times that I detested that name, that it brought me back to an unhappy age of my existence, that I never wanted to hear it again. Especially not from your mouth. And in the same moment, as if these three syllables constituted the eureka moment, suddenly crystallizing the perfect pornography you had been groping for until then, spelling out the magic formula that finally allowed you to reach orgasm by humiliating me, you unloaded into me. Obviously, I didn’t come. I was cold as an ice cube, a thousand leagues from you, a million miles away, for a while already I hadn’t been enjoying myself. I don’t even know if you noticed my distance, my disinterest, my disgust. In any case, you said nothing. Not a word. You wanted to treat yourself to a nymphet that no longer exists while defiling the woman that I am now and who had indeed warned you: that double slight whereby you saw the ideal occasion to possess one at the same time as the other, to constrain that woman by the force of three repugnant syllables to yield to your caprice and perversely turn back against her will into the nymphet that she had been only in the imagination of an unhinged European man, that double slight resulted in you losing the woman that I am. Like the dog crossing the stream, you gave up the bone for the reflection and, as it happens, lost them both; for there exists only one and the same person, and I have only one name: Dolores Haze.

  In silence, each of us plunged into our thoughts, we straightened our clothes. You had an idiotic smile on your lips that betrayed sexual satisfaction, but I saw in it the pleasure you took at having achieved your goal, or at least convincing yourself you had: forcefully transforming an adult woman into the adolescent she used to be, compelling her into that metamorphosis, possessing her through that lens, making sure she knew it, obliging her to submit to that strange caprice, and then perhaps later convincing her to orgasm in her turn from this backsliding, from the regression you staged for the pleasure of feeling as though you were fucking two women at the same time, or more precisely the same woman twice at different ages, their bodies switching according to your desire. A man, two women, three syllables. Is my letter a mere mathematical equation?

  But last night, while you were nonchalantly tucking the ends of your shirt into your pants, you were seriously mistaken: not for a second would I enter into your dirty ploy; far from submitting to your pitiful masquerade, I detested you for having even imagined it, not to mention implementing it. I am an actress, I move from one text to another, from one role to the next, but if there is one character that no one can ever force me to play, a role that no dramaturge or director, no matter how talented or famous, will ever compel me to assume, not on the boards, nor on the bed, nor anywhere else, it is that of the Lolita of my adolescence, a role that I did not play, but through which I was played, manipulated, in all senses of the term. In this hallway perpetually surveyed by the puppet, when my feet were in contact once again with the parquet floors, I loathed your idiotic smile, your sated fantasy, your perversity, your narcissism. Hence my silence. I held back my tears, and made my decision on the spot.

  Then we went to join your guests on that warm night in the garden dotted with candles situated behind your mansion. We drank a glass of champagne, joked around, smiled and laughed as if nothing had happened. But still I could not forget what you had just subjected me to, nor rid myself of the puppet’s dead-eyed stare, as if the pale creature had been emptied of its vital substance, devoured by a starving being, you of course, sucked from the inside, then robbed of one of its dimensions, flattened, crushed like a mosquito on a sheet of paper, reduced to the flatness of that fresco in your hallway. A kind of human trophy. A cannibalized corpse. A tanned hide, a shrunken head. I still don’t know what he was trying to tell me. Your voice pronouncing those three forbidden syllables kept me from hearing it. Was his secret yours? Did he want to warn me, reveal to me something I didn’t know or confirm what I already knew? Was I in Bluebeard’s castle? Among all the keys that you so love to hide and pull out of nowhere like a magician pulls a white rabbit by its ears from his black top hat, is there a key that leads to a bloody den where you keep the cadavers of your past lovers suspended from meat hooks? Is the hallway puppet merely an hors-d’oeuvre? An appetizer for socialite cannibals? A macabre clue in a sinister treasure hunt? The announcement of a recurrent theme?

  All of Paris is sparkling, gleaming, invigorating the esprit* and leaving me cold. I can still hear those three odious syllables murmured on your lips echoing in my right ear. But at the end of the party, as the guests yielded to the excitement of the champagne, you especially were gleaming, courted, idolized by your friends and by all those women who, despite their formal civility and their charming smiles, I could tell took me for a mere fling, an exotic fancy, a carnation on your boutonniere, the agreeable pastime of an inveterate seducer. And you, manifestly in great form, lavished with all these tributes, you were strutting, boasting, peacocking, and cooing without worrying for a second about how I might feel. Socialite first and foremost. No, indifferent above all. Satisfied and indifferent.

  Before leaving here, I will take a last look at the puppet. Perhaps he will finally whisper his truth to me. I hope that your resounding snores will not keep me from hearing his voice this time. I bend my ear to capture a message, but every time it’s you that I hear: earlier the three syllables of my former name and now those long whistlings that sound like a tire deflating, alternating with the hoarse snorts of a pig. Again and again. Endlessly. Why do you always have to make yourself known? Why is it that even asleep you have to impose your resounding presence? Get lost. Are you that afraid you’ll be forgotten? That we’ll lose interest in you? That we’ll listen to someone else for a change? Are you that afraid that you’ll cease to exist if you can no longer make out your pleasing reflection in the wide eyes of your admirers? You can do without mine from now on. I have no doubt that you will find many others, infinitely more indulging, on the feathers of your peacock tail.

  I went to see the puppet. He looked at me with his dead stare for a good minute before finally whispering his message: “You are not obligated to stay like I am. Go.”

  Then I heard nothing but your snores.

  I sat back down here to finally tell you

  Adios

  Dolores Haze

  * In French in the original text. (N.d.T.)

  Chapter 9

  DAVID’S SECRET PASSAGE

  *

  * David is quiet. After a long silence, Doris says:

  “I had already written my letter to Abel before reading the note from Dolores. The breakup letter she wrote to Maurice-Edgar Prote on the 21st, no, the 22nd of June, 1937. Which she wrote in the living room where we are now. And finished with the same word as mine: Adios. Before sliding it into the center of the violet crown. Where apparently the publisher did not find it. Nor did his son. I’m the one who discovered it nearly… seventy years later, as I snuck in my own, for Abel!”

  “Assholes, like father like son,” concludes David, tired out by his recent reading and the excitement, the terrors, the various pleasures of the day. “The father who wanted to fuck Lolita through Dolores, the son and his perverse disguises …Although apparently you liked all that.”

  “The difference between father Prote and his son,” corrects Doris, slightly agitated, “is that Maurice used Dolores, while Abel and I were equals, both of us disguised, both of us consenting: partners in crime.”

  “Okay, well, that’s enough,” mutters David. “No need to remind me.” After a moment, he adds: “And now, what do we do with it, that letter from Dolores? Should we put it back in the center of the violet crown, in place of yours, which has already reached its addressee? After all, I’ll have to translate it …”

  “Works for me. Where is the crown?”

  “In the hallway. On the shelves of the armoire,
which I put on the ground while I was searching for the secret passage.”

  Doris goes back into the hallway, then stops for a moment in front of the puppet in the fresco, wondering whether he’ll speak to her, too, whether he’ll tell her to leave, or stay, or else point out to her the secret room where the former women of both father and son are suspended by their meat hooks. But no, the puppet remains silent. She turns around, presses the dried violets against her heart. Doris as Dolores? David as … ? Noticing her lover’s incomprehension, she carefully folds Dolores Haze’s letter, before sliding it into the middle of the dried stems. Then, yielding to a sudden impulse, she goes into Abel Prote’s office and places the crown and its contents on the pile of books prepared by the writer the day before to lead his translator little by little toward the secret passage.

  “This will be the cherry on the cake!” she cries out, laughing. “On his cake. I’d love to see his face when he finds it here upon his return. When he finds that letter, not at all addressed to him from his father, as he thinks for some reason, but from Dolores to Maurice-Edgar. Perhaps he’ll suspect some trick on our part? Zorro the masked avenger and Doris his accomplice launch into forgery. Falsification and use of false documents. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, onionskin for onionskin. Do you think that’s what he’ll tell himself?”

  “I don’t know,” replies David, walking into the office and wrapping his arms around Doris from behind, pushing her hair aside to kiss her neck. “All I know is that I’m exhausted, vanné as you say in French. Flapi, is that a French word? Let’s go to sleep.”

  “Okay, but promise that you’ll never call me Rorita.”

  “Fuck no. I know what happens to the man who does that. But, if I were Japanese, I wouldn’t be able to differentiate between Lolita and Rorita. The Japanese don’t know the sound for ‘r,’ they pronounce it ‘l.’”

  They go back into the writer’s room. Doris wants to change the sheets and pillowcases. David approves energetically and helps her, then they collapse into the big bed and turn out the light. The young American is on the verge of sleep when he feels Doris’s back and butt press against him.

  “Kiss me on the neck again,” she whispers, “like before.”

  Half asleep, David pushes aside the waves of black hair spread over the flowers of the pillowcase, the multicolored geometric patterns, pistils, petals, stigmas, and stems, that the darkness of the bedroom reduces to a mere assortment of grays, as if the night had sucked up the colors and left nothing but the design. Even their two nude bodies are colorless, pale, sketched in gray on the white canvas of the sheet. David moves his lips toward the little ringlets covering her creamy neck, he kisses, licks, bites, and soon feels a hand caressing the top of his thighs and stomach, then with a gentle authority taking hold of his cock, which is already getting hard. He delicately grabs the young woman’s breasts, massages her erect nipples, while continuing to kiss her exposed neck, and Doris soon guides him inside of her, whispering in a muffled voice that vibrates and groans, at times trembling, at times bold on the thin thread of her breath: Change of décor, handsome. Welcome to my secret passage. You have everything you need to venture inside. Cross the threshold, forge ahead, yes, establish yourself there, settle yourself in good, it’s much more comfortable than the exhausting journey you just took through that nightmarish tunnel where the other, your author, the French author, led you, you his translator walking in his footsteps, faithful like a shadow soldered to the body, subject to him by signed contract, bound to his words and his dictates, compelled to follow his route and fall into all the traps he laid for you. But here, with me, in me, you are at home, safe, you can take your time, there’s no hurry, touch and go at your own rhythm, feel free in your movements, you can come and go as you please, take a stroll through the warmth, wander at your leisure, rummage around, dawdle, amble, loiter, window shop, enter a boutique, feel around, touch the merchandise, taste the sweets, saunter without worrying about getting cold or having unpleasant encounters like in The Tunnel of Death, that sinister funfair attraction. You can even, if you want, hurry up, explore me faster, my Ali Baba cave, pick up the pace, yield to feverishness, unleash your ardor, speed up to a trot and then from a trot to a gallop, finally race, embrace me in your arms, kiss me, sway me, embroil me in your fantasia, bang against my walls, rebel, takes the words out of my mouth, make me shut up sway groan faint. You can also settle yourself into one of my cozy club chairs, curl yourself up in me on a soft red sofa, dim the lights or even turn them off entirely, spread out and luxuriate, nod off, get a little cozy shut-eye, dream as much as you like, wake up later feeling great, rested, perked up, ready to get back to work, get back in the saddle with renewed energy, your translator’s to-and-fros that happen here with no points of reference, blindly, but with a perfect memory of the places in my place of memory. My own place. Yes, give yourself over to the pleasure of my text. Even if it’s not the to-and-fro of your eyes following the printed lines, but that of your blind stiffness decoding the silk of my private passage. Here, as you can see, no hideous masks, no terrifying growl, no nose-diving or low-flying plane, no molded fuselage or nose cone painted with an open mouth of two rows of sharp teeth, you are my flying tiger armed with a machine gun synchronized to the spinning of the propeller, there also aren’t any sounds of chains rattled by a mechanical skeleton above the young terrified passengers squeezed tightly together in the bouncing cars of a phantom train charging at full speed out of a cardboard cave to be devoured by a dusty opening painted almost entirely in black; no, here you will meet no detour from the path, no gorgon or petrified head, no band of grimacing witches. My insides are as black as an oven, you are in the blackness within me, with no flashlight or candlestick other than the soft, warm one you are naturally endowed with, my fingers forming a ring around its base to heighten its rigor. It illuminates nothing, this candlestick, but you already know my place like the back of your hand, as my hand knows your pole, you have often come knocking here, you get your bearings with your eyes closed, you are now familiar, accustomed, a regular as they say in bars. A patron in English, isn’t that right? With your column you prop up my ceiling, without your vertical entity everything collapses in a cloud of dust, our shared ease, our inspired fuck. Here you are at home, you are the boss, get comfortable, explore the grounds, there, perfect, verify that everything is in its place, in order, positioned as per usual, don’t forget any corner, any overhanging, any hiding place, any niche, carefully inspect all my crevices, be meticulous, be persnickety, rigorous, and meticulous, like the devil the pleasure is in the details, yes, do a careful inspection of my nook, take out your checklist and check my box with your pencil, really check my box, verify that nothing is missing, go over me with a fine-tooth comb, twice not just once, make your nest here and act like a bird, crane your neck, spread your wings, like that, that’s good, yes, continue, go deeper, excavate there rummage excavate far, farther, go on, you’re almost there, almost at the quay, your dick wedged up against the mooring, you’re there, you’re bigger than you were earlier in my mouth, my love, do you feel how I’m squeezing you tightly, you are, you go, if you keep going like that you’re going to make me come, wait, don’t move, yes, there, stay, let me squeeze your iron fist in my velvet glove one more time, now hang on for a bit, the inventory is finished, you checked me, relax, be lethargic but don’t fall asleep, no, it’s important that you not sleep, I know you’re tired but don’t leave me, stay with me, just stop moving, breathe a little, grab a folding chair, sit down, relax a minute, the movie will start soon, now it’s my turn to move, leave the room, go along the corridor, leave the lobby where you can buy popcorn and soda, cross the exit, settle comfortably on the sidewalk by the doorstep, near the little glass booth, get some air, fill your two fertile lungs, inhale the breeze, smoke a cigarette, see the thickets still soaked with dew at the edges of me, my multicolored silks, I’m ready, take my emotion, break me entirely, the first lights of day make a crimson fog in
the sky stained with sperm, see the beautiful thick undergrowth curl in the surrounding humidity, see farther on the amber-colored light, the large plowed furrow, the small vales and the damp hills barely emerging from the night, the mounds and the steeper reliefs lined up all the way to the horizon in a gentle atmospheric vision, all this landscape steeped in night offered to your massive blind cyclopean eye, and now we are together at the edge of the sea, surely you remember, lying on a beach at the foot of an oblong dune, the waves unfurl beneath a stormy sky, the air smells like kelp, the seagulls screech, the tide rises little by little, the water reaches you takes you embraces you, your penis gets wet, yes, I lead you inside my port again, my northwest passage, my strait, my cozy corner, my isthmus, my canal, my waterway, my lock, my secret cupboard upholstered in violet velvet, yes, hold my waist, squeeze it tight between your fingers, yes, stop it from moving, just let my hips undulate, let them breathe you, impale my behind, oh, I forgot to tell you, unlike the other tunnel, my secret passage leads nowhere, no uniforms or furs await you, no theater, no dressing room, no prompter’s hole, it’s also not a tunnel used to escape from a prison cell or the dungeon of a fortified castle, no, you will translate nothing there, yes, keep going, again, harder, again, no, you will not transport any verbal merchandise to the other side of me, no veiled word or forbidden fruit, no concealed hidden sealed stolen finally revealed letter, no violets or peonies, no flower other than those white petals that will gush from your one-eyed monster, no message, not even your entire body, just that retractable appendage inside of me, that telescopic leg in its case sealed against the light like a black room opening for a flash and then nothing, you will not transport anything to the other end of me other than the end of yourself, not even a single translator’s note, you are bankrolled by no one, you are neither messenger nor mercenary, neither ferryman nor passenger, my sworn masseur, there is not even a direction anymore, it seems, not even a one-way, only a wrong way, no direction but it spins around, it turns in circles, it goes around and around, it goes, it comes, it’s alive, that’s it, it’s good and long, it doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s an impasse, a cul-de-sac or a crypt, oh yes, like that, keep doing that, hold me tight, with me in me outside of me there you are allowed to go back and forth between the printed French text you’re translating and the American version you’re creating faithfully, this is your own secret passage, your personal sleight of hand, your professional to-and-fro, your paid movements, your certified work, and all the better if you mix business with pleasure, but here in me outside of me you aren’t working anymore, you’re screwing me good, you come and go without creating anything other than my happiness, yes, come, I like your back-and-forth, your back-and-forth ravishes me like a glove, e la nave va, I leak, trickle, sluice gates all the way open, I sink faint melt drown, come, your light my life delights me, come, translate yourself inside me quickly yes, I’m coming