Revenge of the Translator

by Brice Matthieussent

  “Doris is in tears. She collapses onto my large black leather sofa, which sways slowly as I stare at it, stupefied. Doris flies backward, lets out a pitiful cry and finds herself flat on her back on the thick rug, her head narrowly missing the corner of a chest of drawers. Two of the sofa legs have been almost entirely sawed off in order to bring about exactly this kind of idiotic incident. Doris screams in fury and humiliation.

  “But it’s not over yet,” continues David.

  “I know. I sympathize in advance. Or rather retrospectively.”

  “I open my computer and prepare myself for a major catastrophe. At the beginning, everything is normal. But when I try to open my translation in progress, the file that I named (N.d.T.), the following message appears on the screen …”

  “‘The seals are in lotion, loser.’ That’s it, right?” I say.

  “Yes,” confirms David. “Signed with a large ‘A.’ Immediately I understand Prote’s desire for vengeance: a few months ago I put a virus on his computer in Normandy, and now he’s come to destroy my files in New York. In fact, all my text files have been reduced to that same message: ‘The seals are in lotion, loser.’ Signed ‘A.’ And all my sound files contain the same recording of Prote’s ironic, monotone voice saying: ‘Maeva, akwaaba, bienvenue, willkommen, benvenuto, welcome, dobro pozhalovat in the language of Russian dolls, bienvenido, huanying in Mandarin, funying in Cantonese, yo koso in Japanese,’ then, after a few seconds of silence interrupted by the muffled howls of police sirens, the word for ‘farewell’ spoken in almost as many languages: ‘Farewell, adios, wiedersehen, addio, sayonara, proshchay in the language of Russian dolls, adieu,’ etc. Apparently, Prote is less of a polyglot when it comes to saying farewell. Which is surprising.”

  “That surprises me, too,” I acquiesce. “Tell me, David, did you save your translation?”

  “Of course I did, but I lost my USB in Paris. The worst part is that I’m almost certain I left it in Prote’s apartment!”

  I signal to the waitress, I order another coffee with a glass of water and another beer for David. We remain silent for a moment, stunned. Each digests this new information, which is hardly believable and yet proven by our very presence. David seems to have a bit of a harder time than I do getting accustomed to the situation. In his place I would be worried, not only because of Prote and his unpleasant surprises that are perhaps still to come, given his proclivity for progressive triggers, like the famous “domino theory” dear to American politicians of the ’60s—the fall of one domino provokes the fall of another, and so on along the entire winding line of the Southeast Asian states toppling one after another in the sphere of Communist influence—but I think David is mostly worried about his new “textual” identity.

  As soon as the waitress returns with our drinks, he guzzles half of his beer and says:

  “You absolutely have to meet Doris. I need for her to see you. For her to hold your hand, speak to you. She thinks you’re a character in my dream, a mere flight of fancy of my unconscious, while—yes, I’ll say it—it’s her and me who are characters in your translation. Right?”

  “Absolutely.” And I add with sincerity: “Sorry.”

  “No using fighting it,” murmurs David, worried, before adding: “Luckily, you seem less nefarious than Prote. Luckily, it’s not him translating us … So when?”

  “When what?” I reply, astonished by my own surprise.

  “When will I introduce you to her?”

  “You know, I’ve heard so much about her … It’s as if I already know her without having ever seen her.”

  “I want you to meet her, or rather for her to meet you, for her to see that not only are you not a product of my imagination, but you are even more real than we are.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come over for dinner tomorrow night. So she and I have some time to put things back in order at my place. And so you and I have the time to recover.”

  “Good luck,” I say. “Tomorrow night works for me. What should I bring? Wine? Dessert?”

  “Just your presence will be enough. Just your presence …”

  “I’ll bring a surprise for you. Something that will ever so slightly narrow the gap between us. But without filling it, since that is impossible.”

  We stand up and go to the counter.

  “Leave it,” I say, taking out my wallet. “I’ve got it.”

  “Thank you,” replies David. “Oh, I haven’t given you our address.”

  “I already know it, as well as the two codes. B508A at the first door, then A78B9 at the second door. Third floor opposite the stairs. The elevator is out of order. Those details are in the novel, I haven’t managed to forget them. And yet, is there anything more useless than an entrance code to a fictitious building? What good is it to remember that kind of trifle? My brain is cluttered, like an apartment packed with unnecessary furniture. It’s absurd, but I can’t do anything about it. I’ll point out to you that, despite everything, there is one important variation from your dream on the plane: we’ve just left our table at Last Chance Bar and I haven’t vanished. Once I’ve paid, I’ll go out into the street with you, then you’ll walk quickly to the entrance of the subway because in three minutes, according to Translator’s Revenge, it will start raining cats and dogs. I see that you have neither raincoat nor umbrella. I know that when you’re alone you never take taxis. Go on, hurry.”

  We exchange a rapid handshake on the sidewalk, then David sets off.

  Then, and only then, I quickly vanish from the urban landscape to go back to the apartment where I’m staying in Brooklyn and mull over Prote.

  † Starting from this dialogue, I decide arbitrarily that le Traducteur français—which is to say me—and David address each other informally with the French tu, until the end of the novel. (Nom du Tu)

  Chapter 14

  THE DINNER

  Since the elevator is out of order, I climb up a stairwell with cracked paint and a wobbly railing. On the ceiling of each landing is a bare light bulb, dim and speckled with gray stains, barely illuminating the nearest steps. So on my way up I move from shadow to light, then from light to shadow, and so on, four times. Once at the third floor landing, I ring the doorbell opposite me and almost immediately David opens the door.

  “Good evening, Ted. Come in,” he greets me with a forced smile.

  Three large black trash bags, closed with a yellow plastic strap, are lined up in the narrow hallway of the small apartment. David and I shake hands. As soon as he notices me looking at the trash bags, he adds:

  “Prote’s malfeasance. We have to throw out a lot of stuff. Clothes, bedding, various objects …”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  “Not a word,” David replies before adding in a lightly mocking tone: “You?”

  The allusion to what he believes to be my divinatory gifts makes me smile. I tell him:

  “My role is written in advance, you know. Though I can modify certain aspects of the text, take a few liberties. Cross out, correct, eliminate, add, change two or three lines. Within relatively strict limits.” Then I respond to his question, participating without much conviction in our dialogue decided in advance: “No. No news.”

  “Come, I’ll introduce you to Doris.”

  Following David, I take two steps into the hallway.

  Behind a closed door that probably leads to the bathroom, I hear sounds of water, and a feminine voice, slightly trembling, perhaps worried, cries:

  “I’m coming. Just a minute!”

  Then I turn toward the yellow rectangle of that closed door and notice, hung on it, a large black-and-white display. There are two square photos, placed side by side. I have no memory of these images. I haven’t read them. I believe I’m seeing them for the first time.

  In the photograph on the left, two twin sisters with very bright eyes, maybe ten years old, stand next to each other, facing the camera. They are dressed identically: white headbands in their medium-length hair, ba
ngs covering their foreheads, the headbands plaster their ears to their heads and resemble a thin Easter egg ribbon circling their oval heads haloed with curly hair, so much so that their position next to each other evokes the appended letters ÔÔ. They both wear black corduroy dresses with pristine star-shaped collars and with just as pristine white sleeves, so that the neck and hands of the little girls seem to emerge from one of those painted set pieces outfitted with holes for the faces of shoppers, the kind you used to see in photography studios. Above their knees, white stocks that are not exactly identical, for the diamond pattern of one is bigger than the other. Despite everything, these twins, who seem to question me with their gaze, are nearly interchangeable, even though one of them is smiling slightly while the other remains more reserved, even wary. Their arms dangle the length of their bodies, their shoulders touch. Before my incredulous eyes the two dresses melt gradually into one piece of continuous fabric that falls from their adjoined shoulders down to the white lower shared sleeve, as if I were looking at one piece of clothing, one two-headed being with three hands. I suddenly have the impression of looking at Siamese twin sisters, anatomically welded by the shoulders, the top of the bust, the sides, the pelvis, and a strangely shared arm that ends in a single hand, probably permitting the two Siamese twins to write: the one on the left is left-handed, the one on the right right-handed. Then I think of David and Doris, I think of the two of them making love, their intertwined bodies. I think of our interlocked texts, of our battered originals and our misfit translations, I think of our variations, our infidelities, our digressions and transgressions. I think of our writing.

  In the photo on the right, I see a young giant, standing but tilting his head to keep it from hitting the ceiling of a bourgeois living room, a debonair giant with abundant curly hair leaning on a long cane with a large rubber cap, in an unkempt white shirt with short sleeves, wrinkled black pants that spiral over enormous black shoes that seem entirely improbable, as if they were a unique model, bespoke for this curved man, this young giant conversing with an elderly couple with thinning hair, standing next to him like two deformed midgets, two garden or rather living room gnomes, planted there between two identical windows with drawn curtains, next to a sofa and an armchair covered with a rather ugly fabric. The fat woman and the nearly bald man are both wearing dark-rimmed glasses, dressed in drab conventional clothing that both hides and reveals the portliness of their ripe age. They are the parents of the young giant, his normal and perplexed progenitors. I think of myself, the heretic translator, the unacceptable intruder typically jammed at the bottom of the page, formerly constrained to that cruel contortion of the vertebral column. Then I think of David and Doris; even if far from being my parents, they are my incredulous offspring, perhaps scandalized by my mere presence in their New York apartment.

  The mother, hands on her hips, in a shapeless dress with a floral pattern buttoned over the front of her massive body, lifts her worried eyes toward her son as if she were discovering a circus freak lost in her living room, a monster normally caged, as if she’s asking him bitterly what he’s doing there. Next to the matron, slightly behind her, the father, in a white shirt, dark tie, a jacket with a black lining, dark pants, and tiny black shoes, displays an inscrutable expression. Probably sickened by the mere presence of the giant in his utterly conventional home, he remains firmly stationed on his legs behind his wife, the fingers of his left hand buried deep in his inside jacket pocket in a satisfied posture, thumb visible over the pocket as if to sneakily designate his wife and discreetly signal to the viewer: “Look, she’s the one responsible for this walking catastrophe, everything is her fault, I have nothing to do with this colossal disaster, this gigantic cock-up. This is between the two of them, my abnormally large offspring and his deformed mother. I am and remain the immutable statue of respectability, the silent and impervious incarnation of order and conformism.”

  But I, le traducteur,* say to myself: the bedroom of this petty bourgeois couple is probably above that ceiling, and the young debonair giant leaning on his cane would surely like to give a powerful head-butt to the obstacle that keeps him from standing up straight, from occupying a vital space that he has every right to.

  I, le traducteur,* think of my own ceiling, thirty-two-thousand feet in the air and half as high above the sea of clouds between Paris and New York, which I recently made vanish so that I could finally escape my hovel of calibrated height and maneuver through the immensity of this paper sky.

  Beneath the two images, a name is printed in large uppercase black letters on a white background:

  DIANE ARBUS

  Suddenly the display swings toward my face. In a violent anamorphosis, the identical twins unravel and dissolve definitively into each other, the gentle giant grows even taller, his sinister father flies forward as if to crash into me: the dark rim of his glasses, his face tense with disgust, his hand ready to slap, his evil short corpulence rushes at full speed toward my eyes. I swiftly recoil. The three characters simultaneously frozen and brutally accelerated suddenly disappear as if in a sleight of hand, replaced with no warning by a young woman with harmonious features whose wide gaze immediately invades my own. Her irises are like the eyespots of a butterfly: two brown disks encircled with green and gold. A thin nose, slightly hooked, beneath a large forehead. Full and red lips rounded with stupefaction. Jet-black hair over her shoulders. She is discreetly made up. She wears a yellow dress with orange patterns in the form of firework explosions and spirals. Madder-red tights. A few jewels gleam over her long neck and ears. I will notice her mid-heel pumps later. I take another step back. I am lost. Without bearings. I’ve read nothing of this. I don’t remember this scene or this appearance. I have to improvise.

  “Uh,” David says pitifully. I sense that he is also caught unawares, at first astonished by the excessively long time I’ve just spent looking at the two photographs on display, then disconcerted by my abrupt silent encounter with his partner. He immediately continues: “Doris, I’d like to introduce you to Ted, le traducteur* I was telling you about. Ted, Doris.”

  “So you’re the famous traducteur* that David dreamed about,” says Doris, who has regained her composure.

  We shake hands, making eye contact for a brief moment. Her fingers squeeze mine forcefully, as if to prove their firmness.

  “Enchanté, Doris,” I say. “Très heureux de te renconctrer.”*

  “I wonder if I can say the same thing. David and I have had nothing but trouble thanks to that nasty translation of (N.d.T.). Prote…”

  “I know.”

  “Yes, that’s right, you know. It seems you’re quite the know-it-all.”

  “It’s not really my choice. I would prefer for things to be simpler. I would like to know nothing, be oblivious of the future. I would prefer to be like the two of you.”

  “Yes, that’s what David has assured me,” she concedes. “And yet, I can’t wrap my head around this absurd situation. Well, in any case, I’m glad to meet you …Ted? Can I call you Ted?”

  “Ted, or Trad, or Brad.”

  “Trad it is. I’ll warn you right away, Trad: I do not want to be a character in a book, even if it’s you who’s translating it. Or writing it, I don’t know what the right word is. No matter what, I am Doris Night, I have no doubt about my existence, or about my identity. I know who I am. I’ve known Abel Prote for a few months, I know that that bastard is indeed real. We unfortunately have the proof of that every day. I’ve known David for a little less time and I don’t doubt his realness either, fortunately for me. But I don’t know what you’re doing here, monsieur Trad.”

  “I brought you proof,” I say, pointing to the folder still under my arm.

  “I’m not sure I want to see it.”

  “No one is forcing you. But reading this could be useful for you two, unless you prefer to bury your heads in the sand.”

  “Let’s skip it for now,” suggests David, pivoting to lead us to the living room.


  Two large windows look out onto the street. This pause in the conversation allows us to hear the distant wailing of a police siren. “Bienvenue, maeva …Adieu, sayonara.” Abel Prote’s polyglot recording suddenly comes back to me. Then I notice the bricks that have replaced the back legs missing from the large black leather sofa. Then, between the two windows, my attention is caught by a small round table, where there are three place settings on a violet tablecloth. The plates are laid out in a perfect equilateral triangle, as if the distances that separated the three of us were identical despite the intimacy that Doris and David share, despite my status as the textual genitor.

  On that table, within the parentheses of the open curtains, a framed photograph is hanging on the wall. I recall that earlier, in the photo of the stooped giant, an etching, a drawing, or an indiscernible little painting separated the two windows from the closed curtains between the heads of the stunted mother and father. But this photograph is now on the wall of the very real living room of David’s apartment. It is not a duplicate. Moreover, the room that I’ve just entered is decorated with a sort of nonchalant and seductive elegance, nothing like the dreadfully conventional petit-bourgeois interior in the photo of the giant.

  On that third black-and-white photograph, square like the first two, framed on a dark background, there is the face of a woman, distinguished but wrinkled, no spring chicken as they say, a woman whose made-up and slightly parted lips reveal very white teeth and a robotic but seductive smile, a woman wearing earrings and a matching necklace gleaming with diamonds. But most remarkably, beneath a sophisticated hairdo in which her thick brown hair, perhaps fake, is knotted in shining braids, a sumptuous mask hides her eyes and forehead, a satin domino mask adorned with white feathers that surround her probably flabby cheeks like two disjointed semicircles. This luxurious domino mask is itself crowned and as if vertically divided by a small stuffed bird—a hummingbird or bird of paradise—whose body curves between the eyes of the woman, its slender beak in the form of a thin V along the bridge of the nose down to her nostril, drawing attention to the beginning of a long wrinkle ending at the corner of the lips.