Revenge of the Translator

by Brice Matthieussent

  “Uh, no.”

  “I advise you to do so. Right away.”

  “Are you kidding? Is this a joke?”

  “Go get it. It’s still on your desk. On the pile of books.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Go on.”

  Prote stands up reluctantly, goes to his office, and comes back with the violet crown. His fingers are already foraging through it. He takes out the onionskin folded into sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and unfolds it carefully while I turn on my computer and recite, for I have that page of the text, and all the others, memorized:

  “‘Maurice, you can call me your Dodo, your Dora, your Dollie, your Lolo, your Lola, your Loli, but never Lolita, it’s much too vulgar.’ Are you following along? You can finish later.”

  “But …” Prote protests. “How is this possible? I myself am only just discovering the letter in this very moment. I …”

  “You see, you’re beginning to understand.”

  “It’s a trick. You, or one of the other two scoundrels, shoved that letter there. You’re in cahoots with them to conspire against me.”

  “Be quiet. I can prove to you right now that your novel is included in mine and that you are nothing but a character of Vengeance du traducteur.”

  “You’re not actually going to try to get me to believe the story of the Chinese king who dreams that he’s a butterfly who dreams that it’s a king who dreams that he’s a butterfly, and so on, ad infinitum? That absurd mise en abyme …”

  “Yes. And right now, in fact.”

  I rapidly skim the text, looking for the passage in which David eagerly examines the large painting hung in Prote’s office. I select the entire descriptive paragraph and prepare to press the Delete key on the keyboard.

  “Go back into your office. That canvas depicting a double-page spread is still hanging on the wall?”

  “Uh … yes,” replies Prote, who obeys. “Why?”

  “Admire it for the last time. I am going to delete the description in the novel. Watch. One, two, three.”

  I touch the Delete key.

  In the adjacent room I hear Prote cry:

  “My Piffaretti! Give it back! Thief! The painter himself gave it to me, you dirty crook! It’s worth a fortune! It’s my most prized possession! I demand that you give that painting back to me immediately!”

  “You are not in a position to demand anything, Abel Prote. All I have to do is save my text file in its current version for that painting to be gone forever from your office, and from the world. You will never see it again. No one will ever see it again. It will have disappeared into the limbo of my computer, annihilated like the thousands of bytes dragged to the trash that gathers everything into a discreet but gigantic black hole, all the bodies, the images, and the spaces that those bytes represent. On the other hand, if I do not save the modifications to my text, the changes perceived in the real world will be undone.

  “Look at your wall instead of screeching like a kid who’s just had his rattle taken away. I am going to undo the deletion of the paragraph describing the painting. Are you ready?”

  I press a key on my keyboard. An exclamation of surprise springs immediately from the neighboring office:

  “Well I never! There it is again. My Piffaretti … Intact. Perfectly identical to the old one. It’s as if nothing happened. But how … ?”

  “Come back here.” Suddenly docile, Prote comes back. “Sit down.” He sits down. “Listen to me. We have already met. But you couldn’t see me, even if you suspected a presence right next to you. I will refresh your memory a bit. On your plane from New York to Paris, two weeks ago, you thought you saw, no, you really did see, a small spoon levitating above your chocolate mousse. You had had quite a bit to drink that night, isn’t that right, you immediately called the flight attendant, whom you of course did not succeed in convincing. Then you chased from your mind that unwonted vision, blaming the alcohol, you willfully erased the memory of that levitation even though it was indeed real. Do you remember now, the small spoon? Stop giving me that stupid look and answer me: do you remember?”

  “Yes,” he trembles with a kind of morbid excitation, “it’s coming back to me …Yes, the small spoon above my meal tray. I had managed to forget it. That night on the plane to Paris, it’s true, I celebrated leaving New York a bit too much, after settling the final deft details of my best treasure hunt …” Then, after a silence in which he seems to lose himself in recollection, he adds: “But … how could you possibly know the story of the small spoon, the episode that I am the only one to have lived? And how is it that you know so well what went on in my head that night?”

  “For starters, I was the one holding your little spoon in the air. But you didn’t see me. I was invisible, as invisible as your painting was a minute ago. I had just lost my translator body, I had not yet integrated my author body. I was like a text typed in size 0 font. Ten minutes earlier, I had just jumped from another plane to yours. But that doesn’t matter. Secondly, I repeat, you are only a character in my novel. And my memory is infallible.”

  “I don’t believe you,” comes Prote’s retort, as he gets up, crouches in front of the bar, and takes out a bottle of Black & White whiskey. “It’s nonsense, I don’t believe a single word of your hogwash. You just want to swindle me.”

  “Serve me a glass of Sandeman port. I’m a fan of the man in black on the label.”

  “My word, you’ve already been here!” Prote says, outraged. “Or else your two repugnant accomplices gave you a very detailed description of my apartment and the three of you are trying to hoodwink me, dispossess me.”

  “I’ll start the demonstration over again. For the last time. Let’s see …Yes, that’s it, I’ll modify your interior again. A brief paragraph of the novel describes the decor of your walls. I’ll select it now: ‘Drab tapestries—depicting Diana’s bath, a hunting scene, the passing of a comet above a bucolic landscape where rural peasants seated on the threshold of their cottages raise their astonished eyes toward the black sky streaked with a thin pale stripe—all these images darkened with time suck even more light out of the rooms and accentuate the feeling of a permanent dusk.’ Are you ready? I’m pressing the Delete key. Ah, right away we can see better in your living room, don’t you think? So about that port, are you going to serve me or do I have to do it myself?”

  “Right away, right away, but I beg of you, give me back my tapestries. All those large pale rectangles on the walls … such horror … such vertigo …Atrocious! It was my grandfather on my father’s side who …”

  “Hurry up. And bring me a glass of water, too, while you’re at it. I’m waiting.”

  “Okay, I won’t be long,” murmurs Prote, who goes back into the kitchen holding his forehead as if he were suffering from a sudden migraine.

  Maybe I should really shut that bastard up, I say to myself, suddenly exasperated by all his phony simpering. I rapidly revisit Chapter 5, select a few phrases, press the Delete key. Immediately, I hear Prote hoot pleadingly from the kitchen:

  “Excuse me, but … I can’t return to the living room. There’s … there’s no more hallway. My apartment has lost its hallway … I don’t dare leave the kitchen. Please …”

  I place the computer on the thick brown carpet, get up, go to the door of the living room and notice with stupefaction that in place of the hallway a uniformly gray space seems to sink into the ground to an unknown depth. The armoire has also disappeared. In a Venetian mirror hung on the opposite wall, I see the inverted reflection of the puppet in the fresco: the marionette now seems to be falling into a bottomless void.

  Next to the reflected puppet, Prote with distorted features is frozen in the frame of the kitchen door. Standing on the edge of the chasm, he’s holding a tray with a glass of water, a small stemmed glass, and a third, stemless glass.

  “Is that enough for you?” I ask. “The violet crown, the painting, the tapestries, the hallway. Are you convinced or would you like m
e to keep purging your furniture?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” my host stutters in a meek voice. “I believe you, but have mercy, put my hallway back in its place.”

  I return to the living room, grab the computer, undo the most recent modification to the text, and immediately I hear a relieved sigh come from the kitchen. Prote arrives and places the tray on a side table before going to get the two bottles of alcohol still on the bar. He is deathly pale, his hands tremble.

  “Thank you, that’s enough,” I tell him dryly once he’s poured two drops of Sandeman port into the small stemmed glass, and almost as much garnet liquid onto the varnished wood of the tray. “Let’s proceed to the conclusion of my demonstration: in the same way as any object or space in my novel, I can also select the name of a character of Vengeance du traducteur. If I hit the Delete key on the keyboard, well, this character disappears like your painting, your tapestries, or your hallway. Do you follow, or would you like for me to repeat myself?”

  “No, no … or rather yes, I understand perfectly.”

  “For example, I can delete this odious, manipulative, noxious, arrogant, intelligent but egotistical, cultivated but pedantic character who calls himself Abel Prote. I can delete you, by merely erasing your name from my text file. And unlike your painting, which I’ve just reproduced, your deletion might be definitive, irreversible. Would you like for me to try?”

  “No …Thank you,” answers Prote, visibly scared to death. “That won’t be necessary. Let’s not make any rash decisions. Let’s remain calm. I take your word for it. You’ve already given me enough proof as it is. I am convinced. But what … what do you want in exchange for my survival? Money? I don’t have a lot. My most precious possessions are in fact those three tapestries you’ve just stolen from me.”

  “I am not a thief. I am happy to make things vanish and, sometimes but not always, make them reappear. Like an illusionist makes coins disappear, or colorful scarves, his white rabbit, his rings, or his assistant. But I don’t want money. Do I need to remind you that your tapestries exist only in the virtual state of my text file, and nowhere else? I can neither sell them, nor hang them on my walls.”

  “So then what? I beg of you, give them back to me.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want for you to piss off from my novel, to scamper from my prose, I don’t want to see your evil oaf face anymore, I want to be definitively rid of your pretentious and contemptuous voice, I don’t want to ever hear of you again, Abel Prote.”

  “I promise to leave you alone, to do no harm to you, or Doris or David Grey. Although, Lord knows they’ve poisoned my life, those two.”

  “Be quiet. I paid them a visit in New York, not long after your stay in David’s apartment. You who plan everything out, for fear of the least surprise, you who think you anticipate and manipulate the gestures and emotions of everyone you meet, you did not guess—and for good reason—that I would be in New York with my two favorite characters …There, your little exploding tricks made their mark, believe me. The glass stacked beneath the duvet, the caltrops in the bathtub and the sink, the burnt trash in the oven, the lacerated ties … Such tact! Such lovely thank you gifts! How thoughtful you are! But most importantly, blowing up the plasma screen nearly killed all three of us—for you did not predict that I would be there with them when David opened the panel hidden at the bottom of the armoire and triggered the start of the video, then the explosion of the screen. You nearly killed me at the same time as David and Doris, I who am the only guarantee of your earthly existence.”

  “Believe me when I say I’m sorry. I didn’t …”

  “Shut up! I’ve had enough of your hypocrisies, your moronic, malevolent maneuvers. This novel, which you know nothing about but which your life depends on, is called Vengeance du traducteur, don’t forget it, I have not yet exacted my vengeance. But I know the end of the text, for I’ve already translated and copiously rewritten the last pages of the present chapter. It’s Chapter 16, if you’re interested. Here is the end of the book.”

  I highlight the words Abel Prote throughout the entire text and my right index finger lowers toward the Delete key on the keyboard. Prote bounds brusquely from the sofa with a vivacity and nimbleness I did not think him capable of. His fingers grip my arm, push it back toward the armrest of the chair. Then his head violently collides with my computer and suddenly I find myself alone in the room. The massive body of my assailant, for a brief moment lolled over mine, has disappeared. Suddenly I gasp. I didn’t press the Delete key, but Prote’s forehead did, while that idiot was trying at any cost to stop my finger from reaching the small black rectangle … I slowly gather my spirits, then look around me: no cadaver encumbers the living room, there isn’t the least trace of blood. On the side table, the three glasses are knocked over in a puddle where the garnet-red port mixes with the golden beige whiskey and the transparent water. That two-tone puddle is bristling with slim luminous fragments: the stemmed glass has shattered. The chipped saucer containing my ashes and my cigarette butt has scattered its contents over the carpet and the oriental rugs. The sofa cushion where, a few seconds earlier, Prote gathered momentum to launch himself at me slowly regains its convex form while emitting a slight hiss, as if no body had ever sat there. An absolute silence soon reigns in the apartment.

  I deliberate: will I reverse the arrow of time and go back and resuscitate the French writer, or else enshrine his disappearance with a click?

  I hesitate, stand up, stroll through the living room avoiding the dark furniture, then, prey to indecision, I go back into the office. On the desk, next to a pile of books and Prote’s computer, is a small block of amber containing a fossilized insect. My fingers mechanically seize this paperweight, from the depths of time or else from the factories of the People’s Republic of China, where it was fabricated in a supply chain two months earlier (this is the first time this object appears in the novel, I have no memory of it). Distractedly, I turn it over in my impatient fingers, touching and examining its perfectly smooth sides, the perfectly rectangular edges. Still hesitating, I lower my eyes toward this geometric mass, translucent and yellowish. Suddenly, I come up with an idea.

  I return quickly to the living room, take my computer, pull up the end of Chapter 16, then, after the words “Suddenly, I come up with an idea,” I feverishly type these few paragraphs:

  “I leave Abel Prote’s apartment and go back onto the landing. I close the door behind me, and save the most recent version of my text. Then, from the other side of the thick wooden panel, the living room, the office, the bedroom, the entryway and the hallway, the kitchen, the bathroom as well as the entire secret passage situated behind the armoire, are covered instantaneously in fossil resin, in that petrified sap we call amber. In the blink of an eye the hard funereal material climbs up to the ceilings, insinuates itself in every crack, thoroughly molds the objects, encircles the furniture, books, and clothing, the Post-its from the cork board and the ties in the armoire, the gleaming slivers of the stemmed glass recently broken on the side table, the cigarette butt and ashes spread over the living room carpet, the large pale rectangles on the walls designating the places where the tapestries henceforth forever absent still shone this morning, even the little yellow amber paperweight containing the insect embalmed since the Oligocene era, that tiny block encased like a Russian doll, or an Easter egg, in the enormous block of petrified amber.

  “Then I turn around, go down the few stairs leading to the courtyard, and stroll onto the street.”

  Holding the computer between my hands, I leave Abel Prote’s apartment and go back onto the landing. I close the door behind me. The bolt clicks in the keeper. I turn around. Then, with a resolute finger, I hit save on the file named Vengeance du traducteur. Click. Then, after a slight pause, another click. I suddenly hear behind me the wood of the door creak and split under the pressure of the yellow amber. I pivot to the left, go down the few stairs that lead to
the flowery courtyard and to the two majestic plane trees, I turn back to face the large windows with the strangely opaque squares, as if I were in front of a gigantic abandoned aquarium inside of which I can barely distinguish a few vague shapes through the stagnant water: a phantom couch, a little farther back the dark brown hole of an open door, one or two lighter rectangles on the walls that testify to an absence.

  Then I cross the courtyard to the dark porch. I hear muffled crunching behind me, like a monstrous grinding. I press the button that opens the door leading out to the sidewalk. Then, without turning around, I’m back on the street and turn right toward the Odéon metro station to take the Line 4 that will bring me underground to Barbès-Rochechouart. Then I will change to take the aboveground metro on the Line 2 which will take me to Belleville and to Doris.

  EPILOGUE

  In the end, Vengeance du traducteur was published in France under only my name, so much did I adulterate the original text with my changes. With the agreement of the enigmatic American author and his publisher, another French translator was chosen to carry out a more faithful version of Translator’s Revenge. The funniest part is that a publisher in Dallas has just acquired the rights to my novel to have it translated into English and published in the United States. What Doris sometimes jokingly calls a “return to sender,” or a “lovely back-and-forth.”

  I fear that my American translator is none other than David Grey, whom neither Doris nor I have had any news from since that blessed and terrifying night when the plasma screen exploded before our eyes and unleashed its wave of sharp slivers upon us.