“I know. And I submit to it,” she says, before murmuring: “Wholeheartedly.”
Our faces draw closer by the second shelf, level with David’s T-shirts, button-downs, and colorful sweaters. Our bodies freeze. Our fingers find each other again.
“What are you doing,” David suddenly cries from the bottom of the armoire.
“We’re coming, we’re coming,” grumbles Doris, distancing herself from me, but not before planting a quick kiss that misses my lips and slides over my cheek, as I think to myself perversely that David, his body squeezed between the ground and the lower shelf, has now adopted the standard position of the sworn translator, while Doris and I act like living pillars.
We continue to clear the shelf, setting the piles of clothes on the floor near the armoire. Then I raise the plank and lean it against the bedroom wall.
“Done,” I say.
“It’s about time. I’m sick of being bent over like this. Okay, I’m opening the door.”
Doris and I, hands on our knees, which brush at the same time as our fingers, stare at the back of the armoire. David turns the key in the lock, then pulls the panel toward him.
At the back of the armoire, behind the secret door, we see a large plasma screen built into the wall.
Doris and I sit next to each other on the parquet floor. She nearly falls backward and grabs onto my arm, letting out a little amused cry. David backs out of the armoire to join us and sits on the other side of the young woman. Suddenly, without anyone touching a single button or using any remote, the screen turns on.
“Bastard,” David says between his teeth.
I jump: has he picked up on the little game between Doris and me? But I quickly understand that the insult is addressed at Prote. David mutters:
“How did that bastard manage to install all of this while I was gone?”
Doris bursts into laughter. Hands damp, I remain silent.
On the plasma screen appears an open door leading to a flight of stairs that descends into shadow.
“But,” cries Doris, “that looks like… That’s the entrance to Abel’s secret passage, in Paris!”
In a slow forward tracking shot, the camera pans the staircase, descends, then bounces along the underground tunnel, its gritty walls, its deplorable lighting. The tracking continues, jerky and silent.
Prote’s booming voice then bursts out:
“Congratulations! You should be proud of your ingenuity. I was hoping for a secret passage to appear here, at the bottom of your armoire, David, but I had neither the desire nor the means to demolish the wall behind your awful modern piece of furniture, to barge in on your neighbors in the middle of the rubble, to emerge stumbling from a cloud of fine gray dust, surprise them in bed in the middle of their amorous gymnastics or else gathered with their kids around the lunch table, excuse my unexpected arrival in their home, dust off my pants and jacket, thus raising new gray clouds around my henceforth colorless clothes, before following my progression through their apartment as they look on stupefied, a mallet casually slung over my right shoulder like the seven dwarfs carrying their pickaxes—which one suits me best do you think? Grumpy? Doc? Dopey?—then saunter to the wall opposite the hole recently dug behind the armoire and vigorously attack this second obstacle hoping it’s not a load-bearing wall, praying the entire building doesn’t collapse on top of me and that innocent family sitting at the table for the family meal. No, this type of exercise is not for me, this athletic prowess is not for someone my age, even if, as you know, the idea of a tunnel or passage has always obsessed me as much as my need for symmetry.
“So in this instance, I’ll settle for the image instead of the real thing. The image is less costly. Less risky. Less physical (when we look at it, not when we fabricate it, as you will see).The image is more temporal. More mental. Hypnotic. Minus the sweating, it should remind you of the good old days of your underground romp. I am now filming as I advance shakily through my secret passage. See how the frame sways and trembles. I’m less than an amateur filmmaker: a mere novice.”
“What a show-off,” murmurs Doris.
“Another thing,” Prote continues bitterly: “I am not inviting you on a guided tour. This is not a documentary on the catacombs of Paris. Nor on the underground of a banal historical monument. You are not Japanese tourists. Nor is this a private visit organized by a gallerist for his or her collectors or by the owner of a castle for his or her guests. For you are no longer my guests, you are no longer welcome in my home. This is also not an instructional video like the ones you see on display at hardware stores, flaunting the merits of an extravagant household accessory or a revolutionary drill. It’s not a virtual simulation to familiarize the most daring of vacationers with the speleology of a sinkhole or a siphon in the deep Dordogne. No, I am not inviting you on an acrobatic adventure among the seeping grottoes, I am not inviting you to purchase any state-of-the-art equipment, I am not giving you a tour, I am not showing you any tantalizing images. As you will discover, it’s more of an exploit or a performance. This video that you are both watching, sitting crosslegged in front of the open armoire—I know, I planned it all, you are still obeying me (“He’s got it so wrong, the bastard!”)—this video is simply to say ‘Go away.’ Piss off. For good. Get out of my life. Get off of my cloud! Scram! Adios. So long. Sayonara. Et cetera. This video is my last move on the chessboard, and it’s a tour de force! When I’m done, it’ll be checkmate.”
“Bastard.” David lets out again.
I jump despite myself.
On the screen, the camera continues to move through the tunnel, which becomes more and more narrow.
The camera suddenly freezes. Prote’s voice goes quiet. Change of scenery. The camera, now on a tripod, is set up almost in the middle of the secret passage. There is no more sound. A dark silhouette appears in the shot and grows distant, its back to us. Prote is prancing about in the tunnel carrying a rather heavy object, which he places carefully on the ground twenty yards in front of the camera, in the middle of the passage. Then he moves mysteriously around the object and comes back to the camera, doubled over and unfurling a large black cable behind him. When he passes in front of the lens, he waves his hand and aims a large smile at the viewer. Despite the very dim light, his face is perfectly recognizable. He looks delighted, overexcited.
“I’ve never seem him in such a good mood,” comments Doris, slightly worried.
He exits the shot. A few seconds later, as if the impulse were stronger than he, as if he were indulging in an irresistible schoolboy prank, Prote comes back in front of the camera to display a grotesque grin, a sort of great silent burst of laughter. Then he disappears once more from the shot.
Several seconds go by during which absolutely nothing happens. The massive object is still placed on the floor, rather far from the camera, in the center of the image. A black cable emerges from it, snakes over the dirt floor and ends at an invisible point behind the tripod. Still nothing happens. None of us talk. A heavy silence prevails.
I grab Doris’s hand. I know what’s coming.
A deafening explosion suddenly reverberates through David’s bedroom. The sound of the home movie, absent for a long minute, comes back with a frightening violence. An orange glow invades the entire plasma screen installed at the bottom of the armoire: Prote’s secret passage has been pulverized, a cloud of dust and earth immediately sprays forth, as if on fast-forward, toward the camera. The three spectators, seated cross-legged on the floor of the bedroom, recoil automatically to avoid the gray rush that suddenly masks the blinding ball of fire on the screen and rushes toward them.
The echo of the filmed explosion has not yet dissipated when another resounds, even louder, strangely close. I let myself fall backward and drag Doris in my fall. All three of us cry out. A thick rain of tiny spikes pours down onto us and scratches our hands, necks, faces, as if thousands of killer bees were attacking us at the same time. A wave of heat submerges us. I squeeze Doris against me.
She lets out muffled groans. She is terrified. In a state of shock. Perhaps wounded. I wasn’t fast enough.
“Checkmate, my lambs!” Prote’s voice suddenly roars. “This is my film debut, but for a novice I’m not half bad! And I’m a pretty good pyrotechnist too, no? Okay, the first explosion nearly scorched my hair, my beautiful suit was almost torn to shreds by the stones that suddenly shot through the tunnel. My explosives collapsed the secret passage. I am no longer of an age to dart back to the costume room to return my disguises from the night before and grab others in exchange. And besides, in the absence of any offspring, I don’t see what use this secret passage would serve … But what did you think of my second methane explosion? Not bad, right? I simply installed a sensor inside of this television screen embedded in the wall, linked it to a small bomb and programmed it to light my little bomb and blow up the screen as soon as the sensor felt the reverberation of the first explosion. But without wrecking the speakers, mind you. So that you could hear the voice of its master! I did my research: my sound sensor does not react to the sound of a bottle of champagne popping. So you were able to rinse your throats in peace before appreciating my talent for editing and my final pyrotechnic surprise!
“The symmetry is now perfect. I’m surprised you didn’t suspect this ultimate consequence inspired by the principle of Protean reciprocity: an explosion in Paris necessarily engenders another in New York. As naïve as you are, perhaps you believed you would get off easy? That the image would suffice? That it would make up for the real explosion? That the rush of pebbles would be reserved for me alone and that you would be spared? That the retinal delectation would get you out of the test of fire? Though of course the virtual has undeniable qualities, nothing compares to a confrontation with the real.
“And no-ow,” continues the voice, getting slower and deeper, “adiosss. I don’t want … I don want … ever again … to he-e-e-ar … aboouuut …”
Increasing static keeps me from grasping Prote’s final words. The home theater’s sound system, damaged by the explosion of the screen, shuts down.
“Fuck him!” shouts David.
Next to me, Doris slowly props herself up on an elbow. Her yellow dress is speckled with minuscule slivers of glass, but at first sight intact. I examine her pale face, her black voluminous hair shining with a swarm of stars. Like a city seen at night from an airplane window. Besides a slight scratch on her forehead, Doris doesn’t seem hurt.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“Mostly …”
“And you, David, are you okay?”
“I hate him, that bastard and his stupid jokes!”
A bit reassured, I sit up in the middle of a deluge of gleaming glass. David, already standing, shakes out his shirt and pants, raining down another shower of small hailstones that clinks on the floor around his sneakers.
When I extend my hand to Doris, she uses it to pull herself back onto her feet.
“Son of a bitch,” she says to me with a mean look, “you should have warned us.”
I couldn’t have warned them. For though the first explosion was written in full in Translator’s Revenge, the second is missing. Once more, the mere presence of Doris has changed the translation of the text into life, but in an unprecedented way: by addition. Until now it was one thing instead of another—for example, the salt cod in place of the cuttlefish in ink sauce. But now life has unilaterally imposed an additional explosion that does not appear in the text. Because of the confusion reigning in the apartment, I forgot another addition: the appearance of a second, unidentified dessert on the dinner table.
“Sorry,” I say pathetically. “But the explosion of the screen is part of what we call life’s vicissitudes. The text doesn’t mention that bomb attack anywhere. You have a small cut above your eyebrow,” I say to Doris, who then brings her hand to her forehead before looking at her bloodied finger and walking hesitantly toward the bathroom. Then I turn toward David.
His black T-shirt is speckled with a myriad of minuscule shining pixels. The fabric is shredded in places, riddled with small tears that, I am certain, did not exist before the explosion. But there is no trace of blood, not on his arms or on his face. David is white as a sheet, he looks into the haze, he cannot believe the spectacle of his devastated bedroom: the bottom of the lacerated armoire is still smoking at the place where there was a plasma screen just a moment ago, now reduced to a carbonized carcass, contorted, unrecognizable; the parquet floor is constellated with slivers of glass that crunch beneath our timid steps, sink into our soles. We’re treading carefully, not daring to move.
“More afraid than hurt? Plus de peur que de mal ? Do you say that in French?”
“Yes.”
Then I notice that the brown slats of the varnished floor are covered in a kind of crystal rug that splays from the armoire to the interior of the room. Our three cross-legged bodies had stood in the way of the almost instantaneous dispersion of the fragments of glass. That sparkling blanket in the shape of a giant frozen hand whose four spindly fingers had brutally slid around our chests, squeezing and perhaps crushing them. Prote had certainly not foreseen the sudden, deafening appearance of that mortal frost flower, that icy sharp hand bursting from the armoire in a flash to crush all three of us. King Kong plunges his hairy paw through the window of a skyscraper to snatch the beautiful blonde from her luxurious sofa. It’s neither Zorro the masked avenger nor the man in black from the Sandeman port label, but an uncaged monster, the animal strength of a screen of glass blown up by a bomb: the enormous black fist of a gorilla flattened into a thin blinding rug of quartz crystals, as menacing as a large bucket full of caltrops spread over the flat surface of a bed sheet, of a bathtub, or of a varnished parquet floor.
“That was a close call,” David continues in a distracted voice, before adding mechanically: “The bastard.” Then: “I need a drink.”
“Good idea.”
With small careful steps and extending our arms like tightrope walkers, we go back into the dining room. Our shoes raised on slivers of glass crunch on the parquet floor. We both empty our glasses of Guigal in one go.
David immediately sinks into a chair and begins to repeat like a comatose litany, like a lullaby:
“The bastard. But really, what a bastard. The bastard. That dirty bastard …”
I head toward the bathroom; the door is closed. I approach the two Diane Arbus photos. I knock softly. Three times. Inside, Doris responds, as if from very far away:
“Coming. Just a minute.”
The intonation of her voice has changed, but it’s the same words that Doris said only two hours earlier, just after my arrival. The words of the novel, the dialogues of our life, are they on a loop now? Or thrown haphazardly into the thread of time like random quotations, involuntary pastiches, unpredictable parodies. In any event, one thing seems sure: with the explosion of the plasma screen, life has abruptly diverged from the text. I no longer know what path it will follow. Perhaps our dialogues have also been blown to smithereens. I am without bearings, I have to improvise, I am afraid.
All of a sudden, the fake Siamese twins jump into my face again, the frozen giant pivots and grows in the blink of an eye, his bespectacled genitor moves as if to strike me, then these slender characters grow slimmer to the point of disappearing, magically replaced by Doris’s radiant face, the green-and-gold eyespots around her dilated pupils like two dark twin wells, nose slightly hooked, lips full and red, abundant black hair, and her large convex forehead where I am stunned to no longer discern the least trace of a scratch.
“Where and when?” she whispers to me.
I feel her hot breath on my cheeks and mouth. Doris smiles at me. Her eyes smile at me.
Caught off guard, I don’t know how to respond. I see her two eyes leave my face and stare at a point situated above my right shoulder. I extend my arm without thinking, my hand touches the orange spirals and explosions on her hip as if to balance myself, while I turn toward the living room
in order to follow Doris’s gaze. Behind me, I see not the puppet of the fresco as I almost expected, but David’s drooping, inert, seemingly dislocated body seated on a chair. He’s still murmuring:
“The bastard. But really, what a bastard. Son of a bitch bastard …”
Then I understand and reply in a whisper:
“Tomorrow at six o’clock. My place. My address and telephone number are on the folder containing the two versions of Translator’s Revenge.”
“Okay.”
“Read them.”
“I will.”
* I choose to tutoyer her right away. I like her. (N.d. Trad)
† At least, it’s at this point in the novel that I decide she will tutoyer me. Doris obviously confirms this arbitrary choice in reality. (Trad’s Note)
Chapter 15
TRAD’S SECRET PASSAGE
Yes. Last night. Everything began last night. The colorful hummingbird on your face and the black-and-white photo of the same mask on the wall, the crown of dried violets, the fabric puppet into which you plunged your hand, then your arm, all the way up to your elbow, all while staring at me, first extracting the book and then the key, as if with you as midwife the homunculus gave birth to those two hard, angular objects, but a few seconds before the delivery of the key, Doris, when you still had your arm buried deep into the stuffing, you and I both saw the whip between the butt cheeks of the man, his gleaming thigh-high boots, his disheveled head turned toward us, his shining eyes staring at us, pushing us toward each other, pressing us to each other, then our fingers interlaced in front of the armoire, our thighs pressed together, I almost kissed you and then, yes, the orange spirals and explosions on your yellow Lurex dress, the ball of fire in Prote’s secret passage, my body now riveted to yours, it’s still me speaking, for once you keep quiet, you listen to me, like you have been since last night, now you know that I know what you are capable of, your true colors, the words you use to get what you want, you read my book up to the end of the previous chapter, “The Dinner,” you know that I know about your disguised soirées with Prote, your amorous delirium in Chapter 9, I’m the one who put those tender words in your mouth, those coarse words, I who ventriloquized you long before sinking myself into your stomach, lending you my voice against your will, but I think that you recognized my music, my rhythm in my words, like your yellow Lurex dress that fits you like a glove, my words meld into you, they are in harmony with your voice, with your breath, your body also suits me like a glove, I have the curious impression of recognizing it and not, as I should, of discovering it for the first time, in a certain way it is already familiar to me, my hands already know it though I don’t understand why, for my words could not create the texture or the heat of your skin, your heartbeats, the timbre of your voice, or the pressure of your fingers against my neck.
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