Revenge of the Translator

by Brice Matthieussent

  And David? What is he doing?

  David is my reflection in an invisible mirror. His left hand extended in front of him, open palm holding the other egg identical to mine, he stares hard at Doris. But Doris has her bird eyes cast on me. We hold our pose for a few seconds. It’s Doris who breaks it:

  “So, messieurs les traducteurs,” she says in a sardonic tone, “are you done incubating your eggs or…?”

  Obedient once more, we both set about opening the painted wooden objects. They split in two perfectly identical halves and, predictably, reveal another egg painted in colors symmetrical to the first: on an orange background, the spirals swirl and alternate with fuchsia explosions. Prote, or Doris, did a good job, didn’t neglect a single detail. I’m half waiting for a magic trick to reverse the colors of Doris’s dress, too. I look up to reassure myself and discover with a slight disappointment that no: the orange patterns still speckle the yellow Lurex. As if she had read my mind, Doris bursts into laughter.

  Abruptly, almost irritated, I open the second painted wooden egg and find in there a thin sheet of violet paper, folded and refolded. Abel Prote. Glancing at David, I notice that he is also unfolding a sheet of onionskin extracted from the second egg. I read:

  “‘I know that that smarty-pants Doris will have found the eggs at the back of the closet. Certainly not you, David. I also imagine …’”

  End of my letter. David immediately picks up where I left off, reading from his:

  “‘… that she will offer these two twin eggs to you, David, with a big burst of laughter.’” Would you look at that, Prote did not, of course, foresee my presence tonight at David’s. “‘It’s always the woman who, in the end, allows the man to have his balls.’ Fuck you!” David adds, furious.

  “Keep reading,” insists Doris.

  “‘I imagine that it was also Doris who, five minutes ago, held between her slender fingers the long fuselage of the rounded tip of the Boeing 747 with its small ringing grain. I won’t start on the violet crown and the its inner contents.’”

  “All that is well and good,” interrupts Doris, “but, for the first time, to my knowledge, Abel has slipped up. He anticipated a dinner for two between me and David, he didn’t foresee that Trad would be here, with us, during the treasure hunt.”

  “Prote’s letter isn’t finished,” David interrupts. “‘All those salacious allusions are rather obvious, even uncouth. But such is life. Those two objects—the violet crown and the model airplane—belong to the past, they are linked to my father and my childhood. My only intervention is the two eggs. I like the idea that you, Doris, saddle the little Gris with them, like an indispensable accessory.’”

  “Bastard!” cries David, still furious.

  Doris only smiles. “Go on, continue,” she orders.

  “‘It goes without saying that I bless neither your union nor your schemes, far from it. I am not your fairy godmother, that’s a disguise that has never occurred to me. I will not be your witness either, in the event you should ask me, which I doubt. I simply played the reluctant role of the intermediary, I made the introductions and now I like the idea that you, Doris, present him these eggs, that you hold them in front of him in your pretty little hands.’

  “‘Adieu, sayonara, et cetera.’”

  “And there you have it, his final dirty trick,” concludes David, still beside himself.

  “I’m sure there must be something else,” Doris intervenes.

  “What do you mean, something else?” David asks, astonished.

  “Surely Abel has prepared more funny business for us. He likes to play cat and mouse. The next surprise might not be in the closet, he loves to spread out his tricks, make them last, prolong the suspense.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” I say with an unnecessary caution.

  Doris seizes the opportunity:

  “You know what comes next, you could help me out a bit, no?”

  “Out of the question. I can intervene in the text, but not in its translation into reality. And in this situation, I expect the translation of the novel into life will be rigorously faithful.”

  “I don’t like men of principles,” says Doris, looking at me reproachfully from behind her mask.

  “It’s out of the question for me to modify the text through reality. I cannot correct Vengeance du traducteur a posteriori. What is written is written. In other words, in the fiction that we are faithfully duplicating with our bodies, our voices, our gestures, it’s life that imitates art, never the inverse. It all works in one direction, even if that direction is not the one we’re used to.”

  “Help me out a little, Trad. Give me a clue,” she beseeches with a smile.

  Conscious of breaking a rule, of ceding to the charm of her eyes, I take a step toward the closet, crouch down in front of the bottom shelf and murmur:

  “There.”

  Doris crouches down next to me, I feel her thigh brush mine, then she moves her hand behind the colorful piles of bath towels, tablecloths, and napkins. Her fingers grope around without finding anything. The masked face turns toward me, her painted lips say:

  “I don’t feel anything.”

  “Keep going.”

  She complies, blindly rummages around some more, soon says:

  “There it is!”

  She pulls from the closet what seems to be a large bundle of rags, but I already know what it really is, of course. Standing up, she unfolds it, examines it, and cries out excitedly:

  “The puppet from the fresco! The slender limbs, the black braid, the dislocated body, it’s the puppet from the apartment by the Odéon!”

  David approaches to examine the large limp doll, then acquiesces with a nod:

  “It’s definitely the puppet that hovers in the sky opposite the closet. But what’s it doing here? In three dimensions? In flesh and blood? Can you say that about a doll? It’s like having the model after the painting. The real object after its depiction in the fresco.”

  “Symmetry …” murmurs Doris pensively. “Abel is truly obsessed. The puppet depicted on the wall of the hallway in Paris and its posthumous model in New York. Similarly, the bird mask in the Diane Arbus photo in the living room, and the real mask over my eyes. I wonder if next we’ll find a small stuffed seagull, a marine landscape made of plaster or papier-mâché, cotton clouds.”

  She looks at me inquisitively. I slowly shake my head to signal to her that no, she will not find any of these objects in the closet.

  “Thank you, Trad. Thank you for your help and for that clarification,” she adds in a cheerful tone. “Now, what shall we do with this rag doll?”

  Not really wanting to help her any more, I turn toward the bare wall opposite the closet. The place where, logically, the puppet should have been displayed, along with the seagull, the waves, the horizon, and the clouds. But between the two windows where the lights of a skyscraper now enter into the bedroom, there is nothing but a large bare rectangle painted sky blue that extends from the ground to the ceiling and overflows the windows up to the neighboring walls. These twin windows suddenly look like two holes pierced in a blue mask, revealing shiny black eyes speckled with gold.

  “Well. We’re missing a book, a key, and a secret passage,” David notes, suddenly perspicacious. He shakes his egg, which remains stubbornly empty and silent. “Nothing here.” Then he adds, excited: “This is crazy, but …” Bent down, he enters the closet, extends his arm toward the back, and runs his hand along a large wooden panel.

  Doris and I watch, perplexed and amused. Suddenly, I feel the fingers of the young woman enlace mine and squeeze tightly. None of this is in the book. I don’t know whether the emotion that then leaves me breathless is due to this new gap between the novel and life, or else because of this furtive gesture in which I recognize more than just a passing complicity or a reflex triggered by fear, a sort of fatal mechanism to which Doris and I seemingly want to submit, to abandon ourselves together. When I turn my head toward the young woman, my g
aze catches her two gleaming eyes, I feel her trembling fingers squeeze mine even tighter. I think of the Diane Arbus’s twin sisters. I think of their hands merged in the center of the photo. I think of our two bodies soon intertwined. The text heralds it, my desire does too.

  “What’s this?” David says suddenly from the bottom of the closet.

  Despite myself I tighten my fingers around Doris’s, it’s as if each of us were trying to crush the bones of the other. Then my hand brusquely breaks from hers and we turn toward David.

  “You found something?” Doris asks in a quivering voice.

  I’m on the verge of whispering in her ear: “You,” but David catches me off guard:

  “A sort of …Yes, that’s it, a movable panel. Like a false bottom. There’s a hole, a keyhole. But no key. And it sounds hollow …”

  As if to prove it to us, he taps against the plank three times, then backs out of the closet. Stands up, faces us:

  “We have to find the key. Where could it be? Definitely not in the Easter eggs … So where?” His eyes suddenly settle on the rag doll that Doris is still holding in her hand. “The puppet! Let me look.” He nearly snatches it from Doris’s hands, then examines all the puppet’s seams. Disinterested in what’s to come, I turn my eyes to admire the young woman’s hips and waist. “Look,” continues David, astonished, “it’s like a cesarean scar. Someone opened its stomach and then sewed it back up with large stitches. Can you grab a pair of scissors?”

  “How dreadful!” cries Doris.

  All the same, she goes to look for scissors in the kitchen while I watch the unfolding of events without intervening. I know what awaits me, I know what awaits us, the book is clear, but I don’t know exactly what’s in store for Doris and me.

  “Give it to me, I’ll do it,” Doris says to David, returning with a pair of kitchen scissors. “After all, the stomach, pregnancy, cesareans, that’s woman business.”

  David hands her the puppet and she opens its stomach by carefully cutting the beige thread.

  When all the stitches have been severed and the threads have fallen on the parquet floor around her shoes, Doris hands the scissors to David and spreads open the two pieces of fabric, then plunges her fingers into the stuffing. First she takes out a small leather-bound book, which she hands to me like a gift.

  I open it and read the title page:

  “Fragments épars, by Boris Matthews.” Then I notice a Post-it inside the book cover. “There’s a note from Prote,” I say, noticing the signature without surprise. I read: “‘Bizarrely, I found the French translation of this novel at a secondhand bookseller’s not far from your place. I bought it without a second thought. Since I already own a copy of this book in Paris and I have no desire to encumber myself with additional luggage, I selfishly offer it to you. The title suits you very well: you two are nothing but the scattered fragments of an indiscernible whole, of a volatile, vague entity.’ Signed: Prote. ‘PS: It’s not over.’”

  “There’s more!” Doris suddenly cries out.

  Then I see her hand sink into the depths of the puppet’s stuffing. Her fist and forearm disappear into the opening, while, face turned toward me, not paying the least attention to David, she stares at me from behind her hummingbird mask, her lips spread into a cruel, voluptuous smile that paralyzes me. Her hand slowly explores the interior of the mannequin, her gleaming gaze stays riveted to me, her smile blooms, trembles, and tenses, her teeth are clenched, there’s a slight redness in her cheeks. She seems to be saying to me: “All this is for you, I offer all this to you, please accept it,” as if through this hijacked staging she were giving herself to me in advance. Those silent allusions trouble me and curiously numb me, the penetration of the stomach by Doris’s fingers, palm, fist, forearm. Soon I think I see her elbow and then her entire arm sink into the opening of the puppet, which suddenly acquires a new rigidity, as if Doris’s nude limb supplied the soft rag with a vertebral column it had previously lacked.

  My eyes go back and forth between Doris’s burning eyes, staring at me, and the penetrated puppet, disemboweled and erected at the same time, stiff for the first time in its marionette existence. Like the arm of the young woman stuffed in the puppet, our gazes are soldered together, and it’s that double intimacy—her arm, the stuffing, her golden irises, my eyes, the simulacrum of penetration—that enflames us while excluding David.

  A black-and-white photograph suddenly superimposes itself on the scene like a transparent veil: a man with bare butt cheeks, facing me, seems to be plunging the handle of a leather whip into his anus. But it’s the gaze of the man, the creator of this pantomime, which is the most troubling: implacably fixed on me, at once to challenge me to look at the image and to force me not to turn away, to face it for as long as possible, to accept this unprecedented and provocative version of a classic pictorial juxtaposition: a face and butt cheeks, usually a woman’s, like in Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. But here, a man’s white butt cheeks and the black handle of the whip, his fixed stare and my worried look.

  To my great surprise, beyond that photographic ectoplasm, simultaneously distinct and quivering, I soon distinguish Doris on the other side of the man’s made-up face, silently mouthing one word and then another. On her scarlet, moving lips I am then certain of deciphering the words: Ro-bert Ma-pple-thor-pe.

  The puppet is aligned with the whip, the naked man’s body is covered in tattoos in the form of spirals and orange explosions, his black leather chaps are coated in red. In the foreground is Doris’s hand, spreading his pale butt cheeks, she’s the one holding the whip, which is her arm.

  I am seized once more by the gleaming gaze riveted to my eyes. The two eyespots merge with the made-up eyelids of the man scrutinizing me.

  At the edge of my field of vision, I see Doris’s shoulder sink into the orifice of the puppet. Her pupils are now dilated, their black discs nearly invade the entire iris, and through these twin holes I think I see her arm disappear into the inside of the wall of the fresco, plumb the plaster and the stone, feel the marine horizon and the blue sky, explore the waves one by one like a vigorous swimmer splashing about, then her hand and her arm, suddenly dry, walk along the shelves of the two closets, sometimes one, sometimes the other, the old massive piece of furniture that nearly obstructs the dark Parisian hallway, then the modern armoire with the open panels covered in mirrors in New York, mirrors that multiply the puppet pregnant with her arm, the yellow dress with the orange spirals and explosions, the madder-red stockings, the jet-black hair, the gleaming and cruel smile, the pupils of the night bird behind the sequined mask, but soon the hand, arm, shoulder are no longer exploring the shelves, nor the painted waves or the blue of the sky on the hallway fresco, but pages striped with uniform lines, strata of words piled on the bottom of the page or wedged at the top of the white rectangle, like superimposed layers of gray clouds or balloons inflated with helium and lined up on the ceiling of a living room. That shoulder, that arm, those fingers grab the words in large bunches to throw them from one page to the next, shuffle them and redistribute them at the whim of a careless coincidence, jostle the order of the text, rework it from top to bottom, juggle the stuffing of language and throw into the air the feathers of the ripped-open pillow to watch them fly through space, weightlessly dance in slow motion, create slow clouds of white starlings, and the angelic hand that grabs the black words delights in this transgression like a child throwing fistfuls of colorful confetti with all their might over their friends and the adults gathered for a party or an anniversary. It’s Doris and not me who, in a great burst of laughter and following my own upheaval, incites this vigorous and savage mixing of the text. It’s Doris and not me who, hand buried up to the shoulder in the slit of the fabric, swims the breaststroke among the waves of the text and rebuilds the puppet’s stuffing, feels, touches, shapes, and reorganizes the internal organs, the path of the words, the rail of the chapters, the symmetry of the novel. She reroutes the promised trajectory, she launches her
unexpected game. She is the one I dread, she inspires both fear and delight in me.

  “A key!” cries Doris, brandishing a shiny object.

  Then I have the rather absurd thought that the puppet must have eaten it, that key, like some miners in South Africa who, while excavating gold or diamonds, discreetly swallow a few nuggets at the bottom of a mine, then, back at home, explore their stool to retrieve the precious stones, hoping the sharp edges of the pebbles haven’t ripped their intestines.

  “I knew it,” says David.

  He doesn’t seem to have noticed anything of the secret conversation between Doris and me. But perhaps I imagined everything. Indeed, the text does not contain the young woman’s suspect gestures, perhaps passionate or obscene, it also does not mention the name she silently articulated, nor her gleaming gaze or our shared emotion. Perhaps I made it all up. And yet, when I look down I still see the imprint of Doris’s rings on my fingers, the mark of those jewels that dug into my bones when she squeezed my hand so tightly. All that telepathic hallucination cannot just be a product of my imagination.

  “In Paris,” David continues, “the key was inside the second egg. Here, it’s in the puppet. So that nutcase does allow for variation sometimes. He even organizes it. In any event, I’m sure this key will open the door at the bottom of the armoire. I’ll go check right now.”

  And then, imitating the novel’s text to perfection, he squats again in front of the armoire. Once more, I immediately feel Doris’s fingers lace through mine, then her hip press against me. Far from shirking away, I push my thigh against the yellow Lurex.

  “It fits!” David cries idiotically in a voice muffled by the mass of clothes hanging in the closet. “The key works. Lift the bottom shelf so I can open the door.”

  Our hands separate, then soon come back together, as if by accident, among the piles of clothes on the lower shelf.

  “I know what comes next, it’s written in the text,” I whisper in Doris’s ear while our hands buzz about.