Revenge of the Translator

by Brice Matthieussent

  People cry out, at first horrified, then stupefied, then incredulous, then admiring, finally ecstatic as soon as the distressed travelers understand that it’s not war, that they are not under a surprise attack, destined for certain death, but, slowly collecting themselves after their fright, that it’s a surprise fireworks display, accompanied by drums, a bit perversely, like a kind of grand finale devoid of all introduction, an orgasm out of nowhere, an ejaculation fallen from the sky, David says to himself with suspicion and soon delight. However, despite its improbability, everyone seems to accept the new situation rather quickly: after the paso doble in the airport, after the charming discourse diffused by the stereo, comes the night, comes the wind, comes those thundering explosions of multicolored stars that pierce the darkness in stains of red, green, blue, purple, yellow, or white ink thrown haphazardly onto a large sheet of black paper, or else, thinks David, like a meteor shower, shooting stars, asteroids, comets, or ephemeral asterisks smudging the page of the night.

  The spectacle ends as it began: brutally, without the slightest suggestion. The pyrotechnics stop, the night disappears, the lights are on again, the airport finds its ceiling. Like a film screening suddenly stopped and the lights in the theater turned on all at once. And perhaps, after all, the fireworks show had merely been projected on the ceiling of the hall, transformed into an invisible screen. Now, the spectators, the dancers rediscover, after briefly forgetting, the dimensions, the materials, the light of that real space that the film and its colorful explosions had erased.

  Only David seems shaken by the brusque transformation.

  There is then a temporary ellipsis as stupefying as the first, an incredible compression that is nevertheless an obligatory characteristic of dreams, just as the triple axel is of artistic ice-skating, its acceleration suddenly dematerializing the body between sky and ice: all the participants of the contest go back to being ordinary passengers while the multicolored costumes go back to the wooden clothing racks. The victorious nymphet on roller skates seems to have been teleported to a private room of the airport; likewise, the elegant man in the striped suit is nowhere to be found. He was probably subjected to the same sleight of hand, reaching a glory that David cannot manage to envy him for. For even if he is astonished to see young Dolores Haze and father Prote once again reunited in that joint conjuring, he has only one question in mind: where is Doris? Had she too been teleported under the cover of fireworks?

  Still just as docile, perhaps drugged, the placid group walks through the entrance of the hall with a cheerful step. David, who dawdles behind, soon feels a hand grab his own. He turns his head and immediately recognizes Doris, cheeks slightly reddened by the recent exercise, or by the pyrotechnic violence.

  “Where did you go?” he asks.

  “It’s crazy how much I love to dance.”

  “With Prote?”

  “Father Prote,” she emphasizes, playful.

  “I was with Dolores Haze, not the actress, the nymphet.”

  “Oh? Was it fun?”

  “An infernal rhythm, an inhumane tempo, it made me dizzy. The queen of roller-skating. Exhausting. I was dressed as the Invisible Man.”

  “And I was your partner, twelve or thirteen years later: Dolores Haze, celebrated period actress. In any event, Maurice was completely focused on the paso doble. No flirting, only dancing. He was thinking only of that. Of the dance, I mean.”

  “Our two partners won the contest. Did yours also go pschiit?”

  “What do you mean, pschiit?”

  “Your Prote, did he dematerialize without warning?”

  “Yeah, all of a sudden he became fuzzy, flabby, vaporous, diaphanous, and soon my arms held only the void. Bizarre.”

  Doris bursts out laughing and kisses him on the cheek. She presses herself against David, who wraps his arms around her shoulders. Behind the others, they enter the Plexiglas tube of an escalator that climbs above the runways and the tarmacs of the airport.

  After an undetermined period of time, they find themselves alone on the moving walkway passing through the long bright corridor they recently crossed in the opposite direction.

  “Where did the others go?” Doris asks, astonished.

  “No idea,” David responds.

  “Did they evaporate too? Like your roller skater and my dandy?”

  “Who knows …”

  Although immobile, they advance nevertheless on the slightly trembling rubberized ribbon through the deserted corridor of the airport, there’s a fade-out of the décor, at first imperceptible, but then striking: on the ground, the spotless slabs of cream-white marble darken and seem to split, to disintegrate bit by bit, to erode into gray particles, then transform into a layer of colorless dust trampled underfoot as soon as they step off the moving walkway and begin to walk. At the same time, the cubist geometry of the international architecture vibrates, undulates, softens, loses its sharp edges, its impeccable design, its abstract sketch appearance: the smooth concrete of the walls and the ceiling imperceptibly transforms into brown earth, compact, gritty, with thick reliefs. The large bay windows seem to fade, to get dirty, as if someone were projecting the image of dark partitions onto their translucent brightness and as if that dirty image rendered the screen entirely opaque by swallowing it, so much so that the light visibly wanes in the hallway. Finally, the dry and stinging odor of the industrial disinfectant is progressively replaced by the humidity of a cave, a musty odor, a stench of decomposing rodents, of unnamable materials that have been rotting and decaying for decades at the bottom of rusty containers.

  They’re still walking. Their hands no longer hold the handle of any suitcase. Their bodies no longer loom over the concrete landscape of the airport. They move through a tunnel, an underground passage, a mineshaft, where both of them soon recognize that almost familiar place that they have begun to call “our secret passage.” They advance with a mechanical step, hand in hand, wordlessly. When Doris stumbles on a stone and lets out a muffled cry, her fingers tighten over David’s, and he brusquely turns toward her: that hairdo from the thirties, the lipstick running over her mouth, the small bouquet of violets pinned near her heart … Suddenly, all those shapes and colorful surfaces evoking Dolores Haze come undone beneath his wide eyes, as if David’s gaze had the dizzying power to erase reality, strip it down, eliminate it to reveal another: on Dolores’s forehead a spit curl uncoils like the tentacle of an octopus, the locks separate slowly, the young woman’s hair unfurls to her shoulders, the lipstick fades, the violets fade, finally disappear. Dolores rejoins the past to make way for Doris, she goes back to the ancient text, the onionskin formerly buried in the center of the crown, it’s as if she had in her turn been provoked by the obliteration of the bouquet, sucked into this violet hole suddenly overexposed and blanched by David’s omnipotent gaze: there are no ghosts, the dead remain among the dead, only words resurface from time to time, and images, they come back to parade on the stage for a moment to do their little number, play in front of us and exploit us, they do their thing—still irresistible—and then go back to the wings of a bygone era, until the next performance, until the director drums once again on the console marked

  SPECIAL EFFECTS.

  So it’s not Dolores and Maurice-Edgar who walk through the secret passage in 1937, not even Doris disguised as Dolores and Abel as father Prote seventy years later, but Doris Night and David Grey in the kaleidoscopic dream of the American translator. He continues to watch the woman whose hand he’s holding and who has just become Doris again, he watches her to make sure of it and reassure himself, but at the same time he fears that this new power he thinks his eyes are invested with will not last and that, beneath the steadiness of his gaze, even because of his gaze, Doris will erase in her turn. A sinister hypothesis suddenly scares him: if she were to disappear in her turn, victim of my gaze, who will replace her? Who will I find at my side? Who will be holding my hand? And that new woman, if I continue to stare at her… It will be like an onio
n peeling, skin shedding over and over, or like Russian nesting dolls opened one after another, footnotes within footnotes within footnotes, smaller and smaller, type size diminished each time until they’re microscopic, illegible, invisible. An assassinating gaze? A gaze that kills definitively and against my will? Cyclops with his laser eyes. Des yeux laser. Another comic book, this time American, from Marvel Comics. Or a Greek myth. Whoever I see dies. David as Medusa, Doris as White Dwarf. Doris as Alice, David as Lewis.

  A hand rises and falls in front of his face.

  “What’s going on with you?” asks a familiar voice right nearby.

  Brusquely, David emerges from his dream within a dream. In front of him, beneath his eyes, Doris is staring at him worriedly. He is in a panic; but as much as he stares at her, Doris remains Doris. As much as she stares at him, David remains David. Moreover, he lowers his eyes toward his own body to assure himself: yes, gazes have lost their power, in any case his no longer erases features, no longer eliminates clothing, no longer fades makeup like bleach on fabric. Everything remains the same, and it’s the most curious thing.

  “Nothing,” he says in a monotone voice. “I just thought for a minute that you were Dolores.”

  “Oh, no. That’s all over now. The disguises with Abel. I’ve put an X over all that. The costume ball with Maurice, it’s finished. Behind us. I adored that dance competition at the airport, but it’s time to go back.”

  Go back? David is bewildered. To the home of Protes father and son? Back to the home of those repugnant professional practical jokers, passed down for at least two generations? Normally, we go back to one’s own home. To be back at home, recognize the objects with our eyes closed, the odors, the textures, the ambiance of the rooms, their sounds, their resonance, a space as familiar as the back of our hand. But go back there, to that sinister apartment?

  “Go back?” he says out loud, bewildered.

  “Yes. To my place, in me, with me, outside of me, against you, in my arms,” whispers Doris, throwing him a gleaming look, mischievous and impish. “It’s time for you to go back to where you feel at home, to go back there again and again…”

  They reach the bottom of the staircase. David looks up: in the brightly illuminated rectangle outlined by the doorway, he sees the puppet hovering over them. Their palms are sweaty. David turns toward Doris. She is nude. Like the woman who appeared to him earlier in the hallway before making love with father Prote against the closed door of the passage. But that was not Doris. She lets go of her companion’s hand, then slowly climbs the steps beneath David’s fascinated gaze, his eyes following the feminine undulation of her hips while secretly observing the fresco. The puppet, inert, seems nevertheless to speak in a barely audible voice. Suddenly, David grasps the whispered words that fall from his lifeless lips:

  “You can stay. I’m leaving.”

  While Doris continues to climb the staircase gracefully like a naked swimmer who, holding her breath, slowly emerges from the bottom of the sea toward the surface and the light, the contours of the puppet blur above the waves painted on the wall, then the image of the stuffed mannequin is soon swallowed by the shattered mass of gray clouds that fill the sky above the waves. The slender black braid disappears last, like a crow flying in the distance and at a slant toward the clouds, dissolving there.

  “Come,” Doris says without turning around.

  David wakes up with a start, without knowing where he is, who he is, what time it is. He discovers that he is nude, in bed, stomach stuck to Doris’s butt cheeks, which he is penetrating vigorously. Their wet skins slide against each other. Doris moans. He realizes that they never stopped making love on the bed and that his long tortuous dream lasted only the span of a second, the time it takes the filament of a light bulb to go out and plunge a hallway into darkness. Doris is no longer speaking. Eyes closed, face contorted with pleasure, she moans with each thrust. Half of David’s brain is focused on Doris’s body, on his penis going back and forth in her at a perfect rhythm; the other half of his brain still cannot understand how he could have had that multilayered dream while making love to Doris at the same time, that dizzying back-and-forth of the paso doble at the airport and the delicious to-and-fro between his lover’s two fleshy hemispheres.

  An incongruous thought soon replaces the question: he wants to get up and go to the hallway right away to see whether the puppet has really disappeared, as at the end of his dream. But no, he senses that the fresco is intact, that the homunculus with its dangling limbs is still soaring above the frozen waves, opposite the wide open door at the bottom of the armoire. The layout of the apartment, the furniture and the objects in it, the distances between them, the intensity of the lights, the distant rumble of the vast maintained city, nothing of that has changed: space remained intact, only time dissolved.

  Doris moans louder, their rhythm accelerates. Prote’s bed, hardly accustomed to so much enthusiasm, creaks and bangs against the wall.

  “Keep going, yes, keep going, I—yesss!” she finally cries out.

  They orgasm at the same time, or nearly. David, then incapable of sleeping, wrests his arm from beneath Doris’s abandoned body and gets up. First he takes a piss in the bathroom, then, still naked, makes a detour toward the hallway. Walking on the thick carpet between the colossal pieces of furniture that glisten in the shadows, he embraces his American nudity as a thumb of the nose to the apartment’s owner. David derives a slight amused satisfaction from it. That vengeance, puerile, vain, still provokes a brief smile: the barbaric nudity of the American West versus the luxurious silk nightgowns of Paris, the primitive vigor of the new world versus the tired refinement of the old, the insolence of his exhibition versus carefully staged respectability—and it is nudity, energy, primitive insolence that wins!

  But he doesn’t understand that the fight is unequal, that even this derisory victory has been anticipated by his adversary, that it’s a gambit with no importance, an anecdotal sacrifice, foreseen by Prote.

  In the hallway, the puppet is still there, immobile. But opposite, the two heavy oak panels are closed, probably just like the door at the bottom of the massive armoire. The shelves that David propped against the wall have disappeared. The American concludes reasonably that they’ve been put back on their brackets, along with the few objects he originally found on them: the nest eggs, the model of the Super Constellation, Maurice-Edgar Prote’s hat, the bound book entitled Scattered Figments. Who put these fetish objects back? Who closed these doors? David has no memory of having done it. He can’t imagine Doris took the trouble. Suddenly his heart beats faster. Is there another secret passage in the apartment? Has someone just used it? Was it the intruder who closed the armoire?

  A new detour, more worrying than the first, brings him into the French writer’s office; David wants to verify something, a potential presence to establish a link in time, to assure a minimum of coherence in the editing of this film that he believes, not foolishly, he is starring in. Next to his computer, on the small pile of books carefully chosen by Abel Prote to lure his translator, he sees, reassuringly, the bouquet of violets. At least that’s still in its place.

  Slightly reassured, he goes back to the bedroom and lies down noiselessly next to the young woman who he believes is asleep. Then he notices in the darkness a moving phosphorescence, a few flashes of light right next to him: a strangely gleaming gaze, the twinkling of a row of teeth that he senses are set in a smile. Finally, he hears a voice murmur with a mocking tenderness:

  “You, you are a star of the shadows, but don’t all your stars shine in my night? Yes, I came, I’m Doris Night. Do you recognize me?”

  * Subject to availability. Second ticket can be purchased at half price. Offer valid until 12/31/2007 and conditions apply. Please consult the contest rules and regulations available on our website.

  Chapter 11

  ASTERISK PASTA, CUTTLEFISH IN INK SAUCE, AND MILLE-FEUILLE

  *

  * Looking out the window of
the plane, Doris looks down at the luminous constellations that sprinkle the ground obscured by night. Swarms of slowly shifting fireflies that go dark one by one: unknown cities prepare to sleep.

  “So, my star of the shadows,” she says, turning toward David sitting next to her, “asleep already?”