Revenge of the Translator

by Brice Matthieussent

  David immediately falls asleep against Doris’s sweat-drenched body and has the following dream:

  Chapter 10

  THE SECRET PASSAGE REVISITED

  *

  * Doris is still talking, but more quietly, as if from far away. David hears her distorted metallic voice without understanding what she’s saying. They are words, but they mean nothing. He is standing, dressed, at the entrance to Prote’s secret passage, back turned toward the puppet in the fresco. Between the two panels of the armoire, the striped ties to the left, the colorful polka-dotted bow ties to the right, an immobile silhouette blocks his path. Backlit, like someone emerging from the night in a horror movie, the elegantly dressed man holds his hat in one hand, the violet crown in the other. The violets are fresh, sparkling in the light; their translucent petals, as beautiful as the grid of purple veins on an arm or the slow dilution of india ink in a glass of water, are a mass of color, a dense block of pure violet surrounded by an improbable incandescent border. His hat is the same one David found earlier on a shelf of the armoire, its seam displaying the initials M.-E. P. The man, the spirit blocking the path and keeping him from reaching his dream—at least this is how David feels—is Maurice-Edgar Prote, the Parisian publisher. And then the cavernous voice that continues to speak quietly like a narrator or an officiant is not Doris’s, but perhaps that of Dolores Haze. That even monotone voice, a sort of stubborn bass uninterrupted by any pause for breath, is coming from the living room. It marks a rhythm as if it might never stop, as if it were the very support of time, its guarantor, its guardian: the halt of that voice would make way for a silence equivalent to the end of time.

  Then David hears himself say, like a ventriloquist dummy:

  “I am a star of the shadows. But don’t all stars shine at night?”

  In the living room, the feminine psalmody stops abruptly. Everything freezes. Time is smashed to smithereens. David notices that the light bulb on the ceiling is crackling a bit, probably, he tells himself, because of a bad contact or because the incandescent filament is on the verge of going out. For a long time, it’s the only audible noise in the silent apartment.

  David turns his head to the right and sees a splendid naked young woman approaching wordlessly in the dim light of the hallway. The woman, whom he does not recognize, looks straight ahead of her and passes through him as if he didn’t exist, as if he were invisible; then she joins Maurice-Edgar Prote on the threshold of the passage. The publisher takes a step forward, silently offers the violet crown to the young woman, then kisses her. David feels himself slowly withdraw as if he were seated in a wheelchair and someone were smoothly pulling him backward with the inhuman regularity of a machine, and, reinforcing his unease, he feels as though he’s getting bigger, reaching a more and more elevated vantage point, rising up on the tips of his toes, which keep growing taller.

  Now the door to the secret passage is closed, the publisher turns his back to David and lifts the young woman against the door, holding her by the butt cheeks, spreading them wide. From his elevated position, David sees that it’s Dolores Haze jumping with the man’s pelvic thrusts. Head pressed to Prote’s right shoulder, she raises her eyes toward David, catching his eye as if he were much higher up than she, as if Dolores were trying to hear words that he himself were whispering. She looks at him without blinking, eyes wide open. Then, all at once, he realizes that he occupies the position of the puppet in the fresco, he knows that he has become that pale puppet flying through the air, and he feels on the verge of fainting. Hypnotized by Dolores’s fixed stare, by her expression which is simultaneously ecstatic, painful, and pleading, he himself is submerged in horror, he suddenly feels as though he is sinking like a rock into a bottomless pit. Before passing out, he has time to hear the three syllables Prote murmurs into his partner’s ear:

  “Lo-li-ta.”

  When he regains consciousness in his dream, or rather, in the next sequence or chapter of the dream, David crosses the threshold of the secret passage with Doris.

  Now, no one is blocking their way, no troubling sentinel, no couple in the act of making love, no menacing puppet. The door at the bottom of the armoire is wide open, they enter one after another, first David, then Doris. The stairs are clean—who cleaned them?—and the passage, now enlarged, is well lit. They walk side by side, hand in hand. The two of them are wearing traveling clothes. Doris is carrying a beige leather vanity case, a cardboard label on the handle, David a rather large black canvas bag. As soon as they’ve taken a few steps in that underground space that is both the same as and different from before, a fade-out begins that is at first imperceptible, then striking: the dust on the ground is slowly replaced by slabs of white marble, the gritty earth of the walls and the ceiling by smooth, creamy concrete. The light increases gradually, it enters in waves through the large bay windows, they advance motionlessly on the slightly twitching black rubber of a moving walkway. The air loses its musty odor and acquires all the stinging dryness of industrial disinfectants.

  Then, behind a crowd of other people also carrying various hand luggage, the couple goes down an escalator encircled in a tube of Plexiglas that intersects other tubes in the middle of the sky. Beyond that curved, translucent partition, David and Doris observe the elongated cabins and the gleaming wings of planes parked near immense concrete parallelepipeds with panoramic bay windows. A plane takes off in the distance with a muffled roar, the fuselage inclined at a 20-degree angle above the runway against a uniformly gray sky. The plane is a four-engine with an ovular tailplane: David immediately recognizes a Super Constellation and wonders what that old-fashioned plane is doing in the twenty-first century. Then he’s stunned by their own presence in this airport. Have they just disembarked or are they on their way somewhere? Or in between two flights? David has no idea. Does Doris know? He doesn’t know that either. They reach the bottom of the escalator and find themselves in a giant hall. Silently they follow people who seem to know where they’re going, a group of passengers that David starts to think he and Doris are a part of.

  The floor of the hall is lined with large squares, alternating black and white. In the bright light there are a good sixty clothing racks, scattered in an apparently random manner and covered in various articles of clothing, which are in fact theater costumes, uniforms and liveries evoking different eras, all social classes, an array of professions. A checkered pattern or chessboard sprinkled with colorful clothing racks in place of pieces and pawns. Some seem to be in play, following the unknown rules of two absent or invisible players, players whose size we can only imagine.

  As soon as they enter that magnificent stage with the two-tone geometry, the group of passengers, seeming to obey a common atavism or an order known to all, disperses cheerfully. In a perfect staging that no dispute, no dillydallying, no blunder disturbs, each person selects a clothing rack and stands next to it. Then, after an astonishing temporal ellipsis, each passenger immediately finds themselves clothed in a costume while their traveling clothes are piled in a shapeless heap at their feet. The hall contains about sixty small similar islets, variations on a common assembly, an identical juxtaposition: a costumed character, a bare clothing rack with its exposed waxed wood and chrome-plated metal piping, finally a pile of clothing thrown haphazardly on the black-and-white chessboard on the floor. In the silence punctuated with only a few coughing fits, sneezes, nervous laughs, or children’s cries, everyone remains mute and immobile, as if waiting for an event that won’t be long in coming.

  David takes advantage of the silent stillness to look down at his legs, his arms, his stomach, and discovers that he is now dressed as the Invisible Man: a balaclava, a shirt, gloves, pants, shoes, all covered in the same printed pattern of white bandages, a unique medical trompe l’oeil in which one material imitates the other. He does not remember choosing this costume, he doesn’t even remember putting it on, but it clings to him as if it were self-evident, as if it were instead the costume that had chosen him, as if
he would not have been able to choose another.

  From where he’s standing, against a wall covered with illuminated ads for perfumes, hotels, watches, music-hall performances or plays, David has the time to notice a poster for The Cherry Orchard in that row of luminous boxes. Thus he concludes that he is in France, probably in Paris. Then, looking around him, he notices, frozen like human-sized effigies in a wax museum where, by accident or negligence, replicas of every style, of every age have been assembled: a dashing pilot, a Donna Elvira in a spotless dress, an American postman in a blue cap, a little Mickey Mouse from Disneyland, a tall skinny woman disguised as Cinderella, a Rocco Siffredi in full possession of his only trademark, a flamboyant Desdemona, a flower deliveryman holding a large bouquet of peonies in the crook of his arm, a Mercury with white plastic winged heels, an uncompromising Iron Lady, a sewage worker in boots and hat, a voluptuous Castafiore flanked by a rachitic Tintin, a nymphet on roller skates, a wrestler in combat gear, and a bit farther on, yes, between a perky CEO and a skinny, surly soccer player, it’s really her, Doris, in a splendid 1930s dress, a small bouquet of violets pinned to her blouse above her heart. Even though he’s never seen that outfit before, David immediately senses that Doris is wearing the dress of Dolores Haze, the one the American actress was probably wearing on June 21, 1937, during Maurice-Edgar Prote’s party. Moreover, a bit farther on, a graying dandy in a striped jacket and baggy pants evokes the Parisian publisher in a striking resemblance.

  Suddenly, the hall’s sound system blares music with a syncopated rhythm. As if they were reacting to an agreed-upon signal, couples immediately form among the clothing racks and the piles of clothing that lie on the floor. David has just enough time to see Doris begin dancing with Prote, or rather with the passenger embodying the deceased publisher, while the adolescent nymphet on roller skates slides supply up to him, weaving through the crowd with a disconcerting dexterity, then without a word suddenly taking the Invisible Man’s gloved hand to lead him into a saraband in which he has quite a bit of trouble following his young partner’s energetic arabesques. David tries to keep an eye on Doris, but no matter how he twists his neck and stands on his tiptoes, the complicated movements that his nymphet compels him to execute quickly make him lose sight of her, swallowed up with Prote in the impetuous wave of couples. After an exhausting interlude, between two vigorous acrobatic feats, the nymphet appears to be asking him a question that her own twisting and the still-blaring music keep him from grasping.

  “What?” he almost yells.

  “So you’re the star of the shadows?” repeats the nymphet, screaming into David’s ear.

  “Apparently!”

  “But your white suit isn’t very dark or discreet! You look like you’ve just come out of surgery! You look like you’re gravely wounded, as though you were in a car accident. I,” adds the mischievous skater, “would have imagined the star of the shadows in black, with a long cape and a wide-brimmed hat! It’s more mysterious.”

  “Thank you. I’ve already donned that disguise once. It didn’t really work out for me.”

  “Maybe you should try something else.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” David replies. “Do you have any idea?”

  “None at all!” cries the nymphet on roller skates, compelling her partner to perform audacious wriggles. “Some might call it dancing.”

  “Well that I know. Nice of you to remind me,” grumbles David. “And where are we, do you think?”

  “In your dream, star of the shadows.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You can call me Dolly, Lolly, Lola, just don’t call me Lolita.”

  This reply reminds David of another, read or heard in the past, elsewhere, in a life now sadly finished, dispersed in dull tatters in a former chapter of his existence.

  The overexcited skater bursts into a piercing laugh and does a series of more and more stupefying pirouettes that he quickly renounces attempting. From then on, the Invisible Man remains immobile, floored in all senses of the term, but quite visible in the hall for he is the only one not dancing, with his arms crossed, slightly stunned, sullen and stunned, at times admiring the virtuosity of the nymphet, who passes fluidly from a black box to a white box then from a white box to a black box, at times searching for Doris, who is decidedly nowhere to be found among the frenetic crowd of the costume ball.

  Little by little, the skating nymphet’s pirouettes and whirls become so sharp and rapid that she seems to lose an arm, then another, then her head, and then her entire body disappears in a colorful maelstrom—a trembling crimson stain in place of a T-shirt, a red and vibrant corolla resembling a skirt, two fluttering black bars in place of legs, a few twitchy shimmerings signaling her skates—and suddenly, pfuiit, nothing, the colors fade, turn bland, become transparent, dissolve in the light of the hall: where she had been dancing an accelerated dervish, there’s suddenly emptiness, a large gap, an open space among the couples, a small deserted ring, without even the small cloud of white smoke that, in magic tricks or cartoons, typically accompanies the disappearance of a character sucked into another space or transported to an unknown dimension. On the marble of the chessboard, there isn’t even a single roller skate left, not a single strap of sequined leather, not a single chrome bolt.

  David is still speechless. Was he seeing things? Could he have dreamed everything? The nymphet, the words that he remembers exchanging with her, his own clumsy attempts to follow the frenetic rhythm of her pirouettes, was all that merely an illusion? Had the skater just been pilfered by the imperious hand of an invisible player suddenly grabbing a piece from the chessboard? Since no one in the hall seems to have noticed anything, he turns to bleak hypotheses: can we trust a memory if we are the only one to remember? What credit can be accorded to the reality of a being when it seems to have come straight out of a letter written so long ago, or else from a novel?

  As for Doris, she is still nowhere to be found.

  After an undetermined period of time, the music suddenly cuts off, immediately replaced by a masculine voice, low and energetic, which declares to the dancers, frozen in their momentum:

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for participating with so much generosity and talent in this costume ball dance contest. It’s not every day that our passengers react with such enthusiasm to an unusual proposition from the cultural services of our beautiful airport. As you know, by simply participating in this contest you’ve just won a free round-trip business class flight from Paris to New York. I congratulate you wholeheartedly. But the time has come now to announce the names of the winners, the two dancers designated by the unanimous jury as the best, the most convincing, the most … breathtaking, from your excellent group. So … the winners are … let’s take a look …” Electronic drum roll, sputtering of the stereo, sound of a sheet of paper being unfolded, throat clearing, “… yes, excuse me, today’s winners are the young Dolly Haze, the dazzling virtuoso roller skater, and the uncontested king of the paso doble, Poris Brote, oops, sorry, Maurice Brote, the retro dandy, the champion of the fatso doble, excuse me, the paso doble! The two of them win a round-trip business class flight to the destination of their joice!”* Another throat clearing.

  “Thank you all again for participating with so much good humor and willingness in this contest organized by our cultural services. Thank you and we look forward to seeing you again soon aboard our aircrafts!”

  The dancers applaud briefly, except for David, who does not think, even for a second, of banging together the fake Velpeau bandages methodically printed on his smooth gloves. Then everyone goes back to their clothing rack and stands motionless next to the tiny sculpture, like a battalion of mute, mismatched soldiers going back to their sentry boxes after being disturbed by an officer’s whim.

  In the hall, silence takes over again. Once more, everyone seems to be waiting. Then the silence is brusquely interrupted by a deafening racket: violent explosions preceded by shrill whistlings, mut
ed detonations, the sputtering of automatic weapons, muffled artillery shots resound not only in their eardrums, but also in their paralyzed lungs and their stomachs tense with panic. The travelers yell. Almost all of them plaster their palms against their ears. Some of them throw themselves to the ground, searching for nonexistent shelter. The majority of them tremble from head to toe. Mickey Mouse clutches Cinderella, Castafiore presses himself against rachitic Tintin, the Iron Lady crawls next to the sewage worker in his boots. It’s an ambush, an aerial and terrestrial attack, unpredictable artillery fire from nowhere, with no other purpose than the total annihilation of their inoffensive group, lost in an airport transformed into a battle field. There is no way out, no refuge, no trench, no bunker, no sandbags. Everyone is going to die and they know it. Then the pairs of eyes wide with terror see through the white smoke and the sprays of sparks a throng of blinding pompoms that violently swell in the dark space above their tilted heads: those illuminating rockets of bright colors appear suspended in the zigzagging plume of their smoke, slowly carried away by the wind. For suddenly there is wind. The ceiling of the immense hall has disappeared, in the blink of an eye the artificial lighting has been replaced by a nightfall as sudden as in the tropics. And that darkness with the slight breeze is pierced by spinning suns, perforated with violently colored explosions, feverish spirals that seem to spurt from the ground, and then, very high up, brutal blasts of brilliant rays, of golden, silver, sequined cascades, fizzy like champagne bubbles in the black flute of the sky.