“Sit down,” offers David behind me. “Would you like something to drink? Beer? Whiskey? A glass of wine?”
I turn back toward him. Doris is already seated, legs crossed, on the black leather sofa. Her yellow embossed dress shines above her madder-red stockings. I notice then her elegant mid-heel pumps, I move to sit next to her, then I reconsider and turn toward my host who remains standing:
“I would love a glass of 2003 Côtes du Rhône Guigal.”
“But how …” David exclaims.
“Still having trouble getting used to it, huh? You just opened a bottle of the French wine. Five minutes before my arrival. Alright, I’ll stop being a smartass, it’s too easy.” I notice Doris’s slight surprise, her lips open, like earlier in front of the bathroom door, in a ravishing astonished pout. I sit next to her on the sofa. “That’s the way it is,” I tell her dryly, turning toward her to look her straight in the eye, make an impression on her, admire her irises again. “It’ll take you some time. But do not mistake me for a faker, a manipulator, or a charlatan. There are, on the one hand, beings of flesh and blood, on the other a text that pitilessly distributes them onto the chessboard of a novel I’ve just translated—this unpleasant situation, perhaps humiliating for the two of you, I had nothing to do with it. I repeat, I neither wanted nor chose it.” Next to me, Doris makes as if to protest, she opens her mouth again, raises her hands. My gaze fixes her green-and-gold eyes. I continue: “Tonight, I’m the one doing the talking. Not you. For once. Excuse me. You are certainly wondering who my author is. Who wrote Translator’s Revenge? I don’t have the slightest idea. I don’t think my French publisher knows either. I tried to find out. Impossible. The name on the American edition of the book is a pseudonym. Even the New York publisher doesn’t know the writer’s true identity. He goes through the intermediary of a literary agent, who remains tightlipped and demands that the novel come out simultaneously in every country where a local publisher has acquired the rights, including the United States. Several hypotheses have circulated and still circulate here in New York about the author’s identity, but the writers the journalists question deny the guesses each time. No one knows who created Translator’s Revenge. It’s a secret. Nothing has leaked. The few people who know respect the rule of silence: mum’s the word. In this respect, I am like you two: curious, perplexed, worried, sometimes terrified. What would you like to drink?”
Doris jumps, as if my question had wrested her from her thoughts, then she replies:
“Nothing. Actually, a glass of water.”
“I’ll get it,” says David who is in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on dinner.
“In a certain way,” I continue, “I am a pawn like you two, even if the chessboard I move across includes yours. I don’t know why I was asked to do this job. Because of my experience, or perhaps because they foresaw what I would do with this text, but I doubt it. In fact, I got the idea in my head the day when, to convince me to accept this translation project, right off the bat my French publisher offered me a much better rate than what I had received up to that point. Without giving me the least explanation … I read the manuscript from beginning to end and I said yes. I needed the money. I started working on it immediately. I was truly delighted by the qualities of the novel, its ambition, its originality, its monstrous side, its visual impact, the precision of the writing. But I also saw its weaknesses, a certain dryness, a coldness, a lack of momentum. So, perhaps stupidly, I sought a perfect novel. At least, perfect from my point of view. And very quickly, a sort of madness took over me: I started to delete, to cross out, to rework, at first occasionally, small touches, then entire paragraphs, finally from top to bottom. I crossed out several pages, added other passages of my own invention, and discovered one day with bewilderment what I had not at all foreseen, what no translator, renegade or not, can foresee: everything was coming to fruition, bearing out, being proved in real life. Down to the comma, to the detail, life was conforming to fiction. Not only were the parts of the text written by my mysterious author translating into reality, becoming reality as one says of a fulfilled prophecy, but also all of my savage, devastating interventions … Mektub, it is written. The Arabic proverb could have been the epigraph for this novel, which was progressively becoming my novel, and which was also becoming reality at the same time, yours and mine.”
David brings a glass of water to Doris and says:
“Sorry for the delay. We can sit at the table. Dinner’s ready.”
Doris, the smooth talker, the verbal incontinent that I myself fleshed out, expanded, whose monologues I embellished, remains speechless. I knew this would happen, of course, but I’m still surprised all the same:
“So?” I say, turning toward her. “How do you feel? Cat got your tongue?”
Very focused, as if she were reflecting on an arduous problem requiring all of her attention, she slowly drinks a sip of water, holding the glass with two hands, then picks her head back up and stares at me:
“I still don’t believe you.”
Perhaps she doesn’t believe me, but now she’s tutoyer-ing me.†
“Pretty dress,” I say.
“Thank you,” replies Doris, visibly touched, raising her eyes toward me. “It’s a Lurex dress that my mother wore in the 60s. I love it. I put it on and immediately I think of my mother. I also really like the spiral and floral patterns.”
“It looks very good on you.”
“Thank you.”
David walks into the living room with the open bottle of Côtes du Rhône and a flat dish. “Dinner is served,” he says.
We both stand up and join David. “Sit here, Ted. To start, grated carrots with ginger, soy sauce, and wasabi, which is Japanese horseradish. There’s another bottle of Guigal in the kitchen. Bon appétit.”
Once seated, we serve ourselves. I observe Doris stealthily.
“Bon appétit, Trad,” she says, throwing me a quick glance, which I think reveals worry.
“Bon appétit to you both,” I say before eating a mouthful of grated carrots.
“Do you like it?” asks David.
“Surprising … and delicious,” I say.
Then, after a silence in which we hear only the light clinking of forks against plates and the din of the city, I add, with the unpleasant feeling of being on a stage reciting memorized lines:
“The surprise that I spoke to you about yesterday at the café, David, is that I brought you Translator’s Revenge in the original version and in my French translation, but not in their entirety, just up to the end of Chapter 14, entitled ‘The Dinner.’ You know, that chapter where we dine together, the three of us, in your home, in this very moment … Incidentally, I reworked the text a bit just this afternoon to modify a few details: You and Doris probably felt as though you were having a change of heart about some of the details without really knowing why. Specifically about the choice of dessert (I don’t like tiramisu, so I urged you to get a raspberry charlotte), also the wine (here, in New York, the Bordeaux are mediocre or overpriced, the Côtes du Rhônes are more affordable and usually good. So I incited you to buy two bottles of 2003 Guigal, a vintage I have a particular fondness for). Finally, you almost made a blunder with the cheese and I set it right at the very last moment, at the cheesemonger’s. I hope that you will forgive me these variations from my rather boorish author’s original text, but unlike him, I enjoy good food. So egotistically I changed tonight’s menu to satisfy my personal tastes.
“I don’t want you to have the least idea about what follows after Chapter Fourteen, after these pages we are in the midst of living, of upgrading, of confirming or realizing right here. And I will give you the two texts as I leave. You will keep them. Take the time to read them and familiarize yourselves with what I know about you better than you, more thoroughly than you. You can thus plunge back into your past, discover what you’ve forgotten, what has escaped you through inattention, what you didn’t really look at or listen to, but only captured wi
th a distracted ear. Then, when you know what I know, we will be near equals, in a certain sense.
“I brought the French text so that Doris will have access to the first fourteen chapters of the book in her mother tongue, but also so that you can compare the original and my translation. You especially, Doris, might be flabbergasted, outraged, sometimes amused, at least I hope. Especially by the first few chapters, up to ‘The Secret Passage.’ I deleted my author’s text entirely, in favor of my own interventions in the form of footnotes. Indeed, it would be interesting to publish a bilingual edition of Translator’s Revenge, as certain publishers do for poetry: the English text on the left side, my French ‘translation’ on the right. Thus the reader could assess my work as an apostate translator; he or she could observe the entire breadth of my betrayal, the scope of the damage, or rather the disaster. Yes, I certainly got my revenge on my phantom author. I very scrupulously distorted, amputated, massacred his text. Perhaps as no translator has ever done before, except maybe in former times in the Communist bloc countries where only the censored versions could be cited. As for me, taking advantage of the radio silence of my author, I both whittled him down and fattened him up, I struck him from the page, pushed him out the door, denied him entry, exiled him, even if I don’t know where he is in this precise moment in the real world. Everything alright, Doris?”
“Yes, yes,” she replies in a hardly audible voice. She is pale, she has a blank stare, pupils dilated and very black in the thin gold ring of her irises.
“Have some wine,” David proposes, serving her a glass, which she takes hesitantly and brings to her lips. She takes a sip, swallows with difficulty, breathes deeply, then murmurs:
“Alright. I believe you. I feel better. You’ve convinced me, Trad. I’m starting to feel like a character in your novel. Even if I am still certain that I am myself.” Then she shines her eyes on me, brown, green, and gold, as if here in this living room I were the young giant of the Diane Arbus photograph, but more disturbing than debonair, more intrusive than welcome. “Thank you, Trad. Thank you for your patience, for your explanations. Thanks also to you, David.” She suddenly raises her eyes to the photo of the woman in the bird mask who, on the wall above our table, seems to be looking at us scornfully, mockingly, from behind her domino mask, smiling at our naïveté. “Maybe she’s the one calling the shots, maybe she’s the one who wrote Translator’s Revenge. Where did you find that photo, David Grey?”
“It’s my grandmother Sarah at a masked ball, in 1967. Around fifteen years ago, before dying, she gave me that feather mask. The real object. It’s in the bedroom, on a shelf in my closet. Oddly, Prote didn’t touch it. Sarah ran in artistic circles in New York, she was especially interested in museums of modern art. She was introduced to Diane Arbus, from whom she bought a few prints, including this one. She gave it to me along with the mask. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes,” Doris replies. “Please.”
David leaves the table, goes into the bedroom, opens the closet, then comes back with the mask and hands it to Doris. She puts it on her face immediately, adjusts the elastic behind her head. Her eyes slip into the slits of the satin mask, the two curved bundles of white feathers frame her elongated face. She stands up and plants herself next to the photo of Sarah, David’s grandmother. She slightly widens her lips to bare her teeth, as perfect as those of the aged woman. She smiles, but without the affectation or the satisfied cunning of the grand bourgeois. Doris is also wearing a necklace and matching earrings that shine on her milky-white skin. The yellow beak of the multicolored hummingbird lays along the bridge of her nose and ends in a slender V that indicates the birth of a future wrinkle. The two masked faces are the same size, they make the same angle in relationship to the line of the shoulders, they are at the same height. They look like twin sisters, or rather a mother and daughter who through that concerted artifice strive to become interchangeable, each other’s doppelgangers. Doris senses our distress. She holds the pose for a long time.
I haven’t read that scene, I don’t know my text, no part of that pantomime was written in advance. Reality diverges, diverts from the novel. Here, in the living room of David’s apartment, it is not identical twin sisters who pose in front of the camera, but an ironic mother and her daughter, at once mischievous and conciliatory, who indulge in a game they’ve invented to seduce men and exclude them from their feminine connivance.
“What do you think, messieurs les traducteurs?” Doris asks. “It turns out there are four of us for dinner tonight. The text must have predicted this slight modification to the original program, right, Trad? Trad, does my double meet your approval?”
David does not seem to appreciate Doris’s improvised masquerade. Perhaps this disguise reminds him of others, staged by Abel Prote in his Parisian apartment. “Shall we move on?” he proposes.
As for me, I am completely disoriented, lost, without bearings: nothing in my text announced this episode with the mask, this dinner with four guests, one of whom is reduced to her photographic image, these questions by Doris. I remain silent, incapable of responding.
So Doris drops her pose, lifts her mask, hands it to David, then takes her seat again at the table.
“Let’s talk a bit about Prote,” I suggest.
David looks at me, astonished, as if I had read his mind. A simple glance at Doris reveals that she also grasped the association of ideas and, moreover, I feel that she knows that I know. She senses now that I know almost all of her intimate details, as if we had exchanged all those caresses described in the preceding chapters and slept together numerous times. All of a sudden she realizes that I know about the disguised soirées in the apartment near the Odéon. Embarrassed, she gets flustered, lowers her eyes, suddenly blushes, and the color that invades her cheeks, so recently pale, magnificently matches the yellow of her dress, the orange of the spirals and the firework explosions, the madder-red of her stockings. In the grips of an emotion I can hardly control, I smile at her and continue:
“I know, everything happens very quickly. Perhaps too quickly. I’ve known you for hardly an hour, but we share an intimacy that you no longer doubt. I’m asking you to trust me: I won’t take advantage of it.”
Doris acquiesces without responding. She is emotional once again, on the verge of tears. I place my hand on hers, she squeezes my fingers tightly, as if to assure me of their consistency, of their reality. I think suddenly of David, whose silence surprises me. I withdraw my hand.
“So,” I say, “Abel Prote. The French writer. The author of (N.d.T.). The other author. Yours, David, as unreliable as mine, even if he’s much more visible, less secretive. But more irascible, more violent and destructive.”
“Shall I serve the next course?” David proposes, standing up.
“Yes. I’m dying of hunger,” replies Doris. “If Trad agrees, of course,” she says, throwing me a look so helpless that I feel the fear, the desire, the fear of desire, tense my stomach. But I know what is to come. I know what will happen next.
“Yes,” I say, “I’m hungry too. Talking has always worked up my appetite.”
“It’s my first time making this dish,” David announces, heading toward the kitchen. Then he turns back toward us. “It was Doris’s idea, a surprise. You already know what it is, right Ted?”
I search my memory, I find nothing. And yet I’ve already translated this chapter. I translated it, adapted it, reworked it, but to what end? I modified it, but according to what criteria? I can’t remember anymore. And I reply:
“No. I forget. Or rather I don’t even know anymore if I ever knew. I’m drawing a blank.”
Doris bursts out laughing. Surprised, I look at her.
“A blank,” she says to me with a big smile. “That’s half the dish. It’s black and white. Normally it’s served after a broth with pasta in the shape of stars. That’s it, you guessed it, right Trad? It’s coming back to you now? The cuttlefish in ink sauce with steamed rice? Do you remember? On the pla
ne David and I took to New York? The dish that so depressed David?”
Then the smooth taste of chocolate mousse sprinkled with ground Espelette pepper rushes to my mouth, and to my memory a small spoon hovering in space in the cabin before noisily falling back down to the meal tray. I also remember a prodigious transformation, a coup d’état, a seizure of power, the disappearance of two twin stars, then of a horizon. But the cuttlefish in ink sauce does not evoke any recollection in me, as if I am disassociating myself little by little from the translation that I’ve just finished, as if I’ve lost sight and memory of this novel that is moving slowly toward its conclusion. Everything has been finished for a long time, those storylines are behind me, the present scene is finished, even if in this very moment I am an integral part of Chapter 14, playing a not negligible role, succumbing little by little to the charm of that young woman who was, however, molded by my words. But no, nothing of what is happening to me now was foreseen, I am dealing with the unprecedented. It’s as if Doris were coming into her own, upturning the course of written things according to her whims, her crystalline laugh smashing the order of the words to smithereens. Doris is the blind spot of a novel to which no one, not even me, le traducteur,* possesses the key.
“Chef’s surprise!” cries David, arriving from the kitchen, a plate in each hand, as if to spare me from responding to Doris’s question, saving my skin.
“It’s not a surprise for anyone,” Doris corrects him coldly. “And really in this whole situation you are not actually the chef. Only a stooge, a secondary character, a pawn on a chessboard. Or rather the pawn of a pawn, if I’ve understood correctly,” she adds, looking at me emphatically.
David sets the plate of white rice on the table, then, beneath a lid, the plate that probably contains the cuttlefish in ink sauce. With a falsely melodramatic “Dun dun dun dun” he pulls back the lid, we lean our heads toward the center of the table and, through the rings of bluish steam that rise from the dish, we discover a pale salt cod accompanied with a deep red beet purée with a dozen slices of black radishes. “Chef’s surprise!” David repeats proudly.
Revenge of the Translator Page 19