Revenge of the Translator

by Brice Matthieussent

  “I’ve been awaiting your call.”

  I explained to him the reason for my call, my desire or rather my need to meet him to verify a perfectly illogical hypothesis about us, him and me. In a monotone voice, he agreed to meet me.

  Now, an hour later, as he enters Last Chance Bar where I’ve been waiting for him for a good twenty minutes, I think I recognize him and he heads directly for my table. We’ve never seen each other before. He sits opposite me and orders a beer. He’s wearing Levi’s and a white shirt, freshly ironed. On his feet, shiny moccasins, but no socks. A young face, probably as tense as mine. Shaggy hair. His hands tremble a bit.

  “Before you disappear,” he begins curiously, “I would like to know your name.”

  “I am le Traducteur français.* You can call me le Traducteur* or Traducteur.* My American friends sometimes call me Trad, Brad, Ted, or Teddy.”

  “I have a small advantage over you, Ted,” continues David. “My dream. The dream that I had last night on the plane to New York in which I already lived through this meeting. Don’t ask me how it’s possible, I have no idea. The fact is that I was waiting for your call, even if I would have preferred never to meet you. The surprise caused by our encounter is thus for me a little dampened. I’m having déjà vu, like I’m in an annoying remake. I feel like I’ve already seen this film that we’re both starring in. For even if I can’t believe it, I sense already that you know all about my life, about Doris, about Abel Prote and his book (N.d.T.). I also know—stop me if I’m wrong—that you are translating an American novel that, as incredible as it may seem, contains (N.d.T.) as well as all the individuals that gravitate around the text—including me—who for you are merely characters of Translator’s Revenge. But not exactly, because at this precise moment we share the same space, the same table, and I can touch your arm. I also sense that, like me, you are scared to death.” David Grey then extends his right hand toward the left sleeve of my jacket, he squeezes my arm very tightly, for a long time, as if to assure himself of his consistency, of his reality, to convince himself that I am not a hologram, an illusion, a special effect. “You are indeed real,” he says to me, “but my hand is as real as your arm. In a certain way, on a day-to-day basis, in everyday life, I am as consistent, as credible as you, even if elsewhere, in literature, in the land of fiction, I am only a paper being that you can manipulate as you please.”

  In the tense silence that follows, I drink a bit of water, for my throat is dry. David Grey empties half his beer, probably for the same reason as me. Apparently, we are terrified.

  “Why do you think that I’m going to disappear?” I say, sincerely astonished. “I don’t understand.”

  “So there are some things you don’t understand? Certain details that escape you?”

  “My life is not written, contrary to yours, David. We have to find common ground, between you, written down, and me, translating you into French. But it’s true, I don’t understand at all how I can have a drink and a conversation with one of the characters of the book that I’m translating. It’s a new situation for me, it’s rather frightening, I’m having a hard time getting used to it. This book that I’m translating scares me, your presence here scares me.”

  * In French in the original text, like all the passages followed by an asterisk. (N.d.T.)

  “Welcome to the club, Ted,” David acquiesces, holding out his hand, which I grab and squeeze with warmth.

  “After all, we are both translators,” I say. “That creates a bond, we translate the same languages, though in the opposite direction. But in our case we cannot really speak of fellowship, of brotherhood, we are not on equal footing: a genealogy would be more appropriate, as if you descended from me, as if I engendered you. As a rough guess, I believe you are twenty years younger than me. My author does not give all those details. I’m fifty-three years old, you could be my diaphanous son, semitransparent, genetically modified, my GMO spawn. But why do you think that I’m going to disappear?”

  “Because that’s what happened in my dream. Doris and I had just taken off from the Paris airport, I fell asleep, and I dreamed our encounter in this bar in Manhattan, the Last Chance Bar. You were as you are now: in a dark suit, burgundy shirt, thin-rimmed glasses, salt and pepper hair, wrinkles from your eyes to your temples, etc. The spitting image of you. You told me in the dream what I’ve just repeated to you here, without a single protest. And then after a little while, before I had the chance to ask your name, you vanished… Your body disappeared, I was alone in front of an empty chair. And I woke up on the plane.”

  “Don’t expect me to base my present behavior on that of the character in your dream. Don’t inverse the roles. I’m not planning to disappear into thin air, as you said, isn’t that right, David, to your incredulous and slightly mocking companion, seated between you and the window.”

  “Yes, I have an impeccable memory. It clutters me, nothing is erased. It invades me, submerges me. Some days, it phagocytes me and I can do nothing but relive episodes of my past. It often scares my friends. My memories might terrify you, too, you and Doris.† I know everything about you both as characters, and I know fairly well who you are as people. At present, I have to tell you something that will not reassure you. The worst thing for you two is that I recently finished translating Translator’s Revenge into French; thus, I also possess an infallible memory of your future, which is henceforth linked to mine. And since, unfortunately for me, I forget nothing, I know how we are going to separate in just under an hour in front of this bar, I know what day we will see each other again, what we will say to each other, the eventual friendship we will share, what Doris will do, what you will do, and what I will do. As for you two, I know what will happen to you tonight, tomorrow, next week, in a month, etc. With one exception, however: I know what the words of my novel say, but I don’t know what happens to you between those words, those phrases, those paragraphs, those chapters, when you change status from character to person in flesh and blood. I even think that in these gaps, in those residual blank spaces, in the nonwritten that constitutes the most clear-cut part of your life, you have all the freedom to act and think as you like. The exits are numerous, you can both easily escape the text. It is riddled with holes like a sieve, pierced like a Gruyère, drilled with an entire network of secret passages that allow you to go elsewhere to see whether I am there—and I am not there, ever, you are outside the range of my words, my orders, my spheres encompassed by other spheres, themselves inscribed in other spheres, and so on and so forth, perhaps infinitely, a dizzying interlocking of successive inclusions. Nevertheless, all you have to do is step to the side to escape it. It’s even easier for you because my other employs multiple temporal ellipses—thus the empty gaps, the voids available to you, the alcoves you can throw yourselves into—and he also displays an inveterate taste for the sentence fragment, for a discreet sampling of the continuum of your existences.

  “A being is a whole, and you and Doris can have a mind of your own. You are free, or sometimes free and sometimes subjected to this text that I know like the back of my hand, ‘comme ma main connaît sa poche’—that’s a quote from Vengeance du traducteur.

  “Well, now things are more clear: you know that I know. Apparently, your dream informed you, and my words have just proved it. My absurd hypothesis, your worst fear, is happening. I am here to confirm: I know all that my book says about your past and your future, but no more. For example, I knew that in coming here we would have this discussion. I also knew that your dream anticipated our meeting today, for that prophetic dream is in my book, I translated it, I know it by heart, like the rest. I too have to play my role. And at this point in our conversation, my next remark, which is written in the book, is: ‘What can I do for you?’”

  “Ted, you know Abel Prote, of course.”

  “A character of the novel.”

  “No! A rather experimental, interesting novelist, but as you know, he’s also a nasty piece of work that I was wrong to
trust. I’ve just let him stay my apartment in SoHo. In fact it was more of an exchange where …”

  “I know.”

  “And my partner, Doris …”

  “I know about that, too.”

  “He’s rather thorough, your author. Not so fragmentary after all. He’s left nothing out.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You’re sure he doesn’t work for the FBI, the CIA, or one of those secret services, like PSYOPS?”

  “It’s both more complicated and much more simple than that.”

  “Well, okay,” concedes David. “I still have to explain to you in detail. Doris and I came back from Paris this morning at dawn. Your call came not long after…I hadn’t yet finished translating (N.d.T.), Prote’s novel. Before leaving I left my translation on the computer. I didn’t plan to work on it in Paris, I had other things in mind.”

  “Doris.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It went well with Doris, no?”

  “We can’t hide anything from you.”

  “You can, you can, I told you. It’s true that I know the details of your reunion in the secret passage pretty well, your two first nights of Parisian love—excuse my professional indiscretion, but my author isn’t much of a prude, and besides, you both seem to commit to it wholeheartedly. I really liked Doris’s monologue, don’t be mad at me, we have to be frank with each other. You know that I know, not everything, but certain things, so I feel like I have the right to tell you that I find Doris marvelous. Don’t be jealous, please: just as I see you almost as a son, Doris is a bit like my daughter. The ban on incest certainly applies between a man endowed with my degree of reality and a woman for whom at least a part of her existence depends on words, on my words. And so I should be able to remind you, without you screaming bloody murder, that Doris has a wild talent for speaking to you while you’re busy in-her-within-her-outside-her. ‘You come and go without creating anything other than my happiness.’ Yes, in case you had forgotten those words your girlfriend whispered, it’s all written down, in my house, in my text. Even if you know hardly anything about me, we are constrained to intimacy, obliged to skip ahead in our friendship. So renounce all false modesty, those little compromises of language that turn life into endless cowardice. My memory is merciless: I know better than you everything Doris whispered to you that night. You only heard her speech the one time, and without a keen focus, with a distracted ear, for your mind was elsewhere. But for me, that passage, which is ‘your secret passage,’ I read it and reread it a hundred times, translated, refined, corrected, flavored it like a sauce, lightly seasoned, spiced, developed—my author sometimes lacks passion, audacity, is a bit too dry. In sum, I know by heart Doris’s monologue in its definitive French version, established by my efforts. I know, you think I’m an absolute voyeur, the ultimate pervert. But I swear to you that I am not: remember, I saw nothing, I was not hidden behind a two-way mirror or in an armoire with half-open doors to spy on you two. I was not there that night. Nor the next. It’s more complicated and at the same time more simple: I saw nothing, but I read everything. That’s the best way I can explain it.

  “Where was I? I’m a chatterbox, I admit it, and sometimes lose track. Oh, right, I know certain details, your two first nights in Paris, your dream about the airport, the paso doble, the fireworks, Doris naked climbing back up the stairs as though floating toward the waves of the fresco, and then your dream in the plane, the asterisk pasta, the cuttlefish in ink sauce, and the millefeuille. Even the superimposition of the cloud of little white stairs swimming in your broth with the residual image of the blinking green and red lights of Prote’s plane flying in the opposite direction to yours. I even took advantage of that optical convergence to discreetly jump from one plane to another and incite my personal coup d’état, to send flying the two asterisks of the horizon line, the superfluous disgraces that kept me from flying, after which I took control of the plane and the page. Well, this is all going over your head, I’m sure, I can tell by your perplexed expression. You must think I’m delirious. But that’s not any of your business, it concerns only me.

  “In any case, I assure you that I know like the back of my hand tapping away at my keyboard only two days of your trip to Paris with Doris, and a few moments of your return to New York. The rest belongs to you two alone. The rest I’ve heard nothing about. As for the activities of Prote during that time, I’m completely ignorant, my author said nothing to me about it, even if of course I know what will follow, what you will tell me, what I will inevitably reply to you.”

  “And so,” David resumes, visibly perturbed by my talent for drawing conclusions from our dissymmetrical exchange. “Doris and I get back to my apartment in SoHo and we find a note from Prote.”

  “Huh, that’s strange,” I say. “That detail isn’t in my book. Or else I forgot it … Go on.”

  “Prote’s note said something like: ‘Hello, my lovebirds. I hope you had a good time in Paris and enjoyed my apartment. Was the treasure hunt a success? I prepared it meticulously. Was Doris indulgent? Was David impressive? The bed wasn’t too hard? For I have no doubt that you, Doris, succumbed to the charms of Zorro. You always had a weakness for disguises, do you remember? I don’t imagine either of you slept or worked much in the past two weeks. I did: I slept well and made a lot of progress. I walked through New York, wrote down the names of streets, cafés, bars, stores, and subway maps; I took many photos, bought a different newspaper each morning, timed the distances taken by foot, by taxi, or underground (not in secret passages, but in the tunnels of the subway). Every morning I checked the thermometer and observed the sky, I ate lunch and dinner in various restaurants whose menus and prices I copied down with great detail in my notebook.’ He continues in the same vein that you …”

  “Translated? Yes, I know. I know Abel Prote. His gift of the gab. His talent. His vanity. His malice.”

  “He then informs me that he has gathered a load of information in preparation for our joint adaptation of his novel (N.d.T.), supposedly to facilitate my work … If my memory serves, he concludes his letter with these words: ‘I have taken the liberty of making a few adjustments in your apartment, David. To you both I say, to borrow a phrase from the Tahitians: Maeva, welcome! But I have prepared neither garlands nor flowers, no Vahines folk dancers with long ebony hair against a Technicolor sunset backdrop. Or akwaaba as the Ivorians say, but without the traditional gifts, printed fabrics, sculpted scraps of wood, braided fans, juicy mangos. For you, I have chosen other welcoming gifts. Ready for another treasure hunt?’ Signed: Abel Prote.”

  “And what are these gifts?” I ask with a certain weariness.

  “We set down our luggage in the entryway, we read Prote’s note, exchange a worried glance, and then we begin exploring the apartment. At first everything seems to be in place. Then Doris screams from the bathroom. I rush to her and discover the sink and the shower filled with big caltrops, spikes pointed toward the ceiling, ready to thrust themselves into our bare feet. ‘That bastard!’ I say. On the mirror above the sink is a message written in shaving cream: ‘Don’t mess with the bull or you’ll get the horns.’ The greenish letters drip, the exclamation point is a long repugnant run down to the bottom of the mirror and the shelf. Then we go into the bedroom, paying attention to where we step. Everything seems in order. I get down on all fours to look under the bed.”

  “Nothing there, right?” I say.

  “No, nothing. But how do you … Oh, right.”

  “And then?”

  “We lift up the duvet to be sure and find the second of Prote’s ‘gifts’: a uniform, gleaming rug of crushed glass covering the bottom sheet. That bastard added a few copious squirts of ketchup and hot mustard to evoke the idea of bloody wounds. Doris is furious, nauseated. A violet crinkled Post-it has been stuck beneath the duvet: ‘Welcome to bed! I arranged the linens as if I were shutting the cover of a beautiful book, and now you’re reading the title page. Not bad, right?’”
r />   “And then?”

  “And then? We go to the kitchenette, where a rank odor makes us grimace. With a fearful hand Doris opens the fridge, and I the oven. We both scream at the same time. Her because of the stench that bursts from the inside of the fridge—stink bombs, rotten eggs, unnamable sauces that stain the white walls—me because the oven is filled to the brim with burnt trash. I close the door of the oven and see another violet Post-it stuck to it: ‘Enjoy your meal! For those mindful of the environment, I recycled when appropriate. Bon appétit!’ I cry out ‘Fucking asshole!’ and give a swift kick to the oven. I hurt my toes. Doris is on the verge of tears.

  “Prote managed to ransack the apartment while maintaining its presentable appearance, a semblance of order. But as soon as we open a drawer, a cupboard, or a cabinet, a nasty surprise awaits us, accompanied by an umpteenth violet Post-it. A dead bat nailed to the bottom of the closet (‘You’ve been warned’), all my socks slit with a box cutter (‘There aren’t any dust rags in this pigsty’), my shoes filled with dish soap (‘“Big spring cleaning’) my few ties trimmed with scissors (‘Such pretentious manly attributes!’), all the wires and electric cords sliced clean, the drum of the washing machine filled to the brim with soaked and swollen books (‘Let’s clean the American language of all its foreign impurities!’) the alcohol in bottles replaced by household cleaners (‘Consume with moderation’), the toilets clogged with a mountain of yellow scrubbing sponges (with that strange Post-it stuck under the toilet seat cover: ‘God is an American’). And more in the same vein, simultaneously mean, moronic, and mocking, as if a band of young cretins had squatted in my apartment before leaving their repugnant signature. A final detail: when I take a few books off my shelves, I notice that about half of the pages have been snipped by rampaging scissors …