Oops, I said. Andi, of course, had crossed safely and was staring into the window of Cohn’s Cones.
When we arrived at the China Doll, Andi insisted on a toast, and a Shirley Temple.
Topeka! she cried, after we’d ordered and I’d explained why we were celebrating and answered Andi’s several questions (what’s a Dante, what’s a postmodernist canon)—Topeka being Andi’s version of Eureka, a term that referred not just to aha! moments but to any experience of fulfillment, wonder, gratitude, surprise. I get it! I’ve got it! Waffles for breakfast! Topeka! Then she sang a version of “For She’s a Jolly Good Translator,” which sounded very much like “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
Ahmad sang that I was jolly good, but he didn’t look so sure.
What is it? I said, moving my mom-bag off the table to make room for Peking duck and mooshu pork.
We don’t know much about this chap, do we?
What’s to know? I said, peeling off pancakes for Andi. Nobel Prize, college fund, braces, Barbie Dream Palace.
He gave me a look. For one thing, his university would cover Andi’s tuition; for another, Andi’s teeth were coming in and they were beautiful.
You hate literary translation! he said. You said it’s the last refuge of logical positivism!
I never! I don’t even know what that means! Pass the hoisin, please.
At our Halloween party you dressed as the traduttore/traditore and ranted about the untranslatability of all texts.
The what? my baby said.
The traitorous translator, Ahmad said.
That sounds like a dumb costume, she said.
Maybe I’ve seen the light, I said. What’s this about? Last night you said this was the most amazing job in the world.
I’ve been thinking—I do that sometimes. Why does he want to publish the translation before the original? I’ve never heard of that. Is he giving up on his traditional European audience?
The U.S. is a helluva market.
It doesn’t make sense, Shira.
Didn’t we have another dish?
Red bean paste, said Andi, for dessert. No! she said, pushing my hand away. I make my own pancakes, remember?
Why does he want a draft by the end of the year? Ahmad asked. Did he explain that?
You can’t ruin this for me, I said.
Who’s ruining anything? I’m asking questions!
No fighting, Andi said. I hereby forbid it.
Y2K poetry, I said. He wants a draft by the end of the year because he’s a millenarian. He wants his work to defend him come Judgment Day.
And Jesus the Judge reads only English? Ahmad asked, half smiling.
Stands to reason if God is an American, I said.
God is an American? Andi asked.
From that sublime height I managed to shift the conversation to millenarian madness (which Ahmad told Andi had something to do with hats): our favorite babysitter’s twelve-step program for Y2K readiness; Yeats’ “rough beast” slouching, even as we speak, toward Bethlehem; Dante’s mysterious messenger, identified by the number five-fifteen, ready to announce the end of days.
Andi had been playing with Mr. Fork and Mrs. Knife, putting them to bed between two chopsticks.
You know, she said, this isn’t the most fascinating conversation we’ve ever had.
Andi, I said, before she could elaborate, let the grown-ups finish their conversation, then we can find something you can talk about, okay?
It’s late, Ahmad said. I think it’s time.
He was right. Andi was tired, so Ahmad flew her home like a 767 jet.
10
A FAIRY TALE
It was a typical weekend. Ahmad took Andi to Coney Island to satisfy her ambition to ride the Cyclone six times without throwing up. The outcome of this venture was an Andi-Ahmad secret, but the stain on the front of her jumpsuit told all. Sunday, Andi and I went to the Natural History Museum to look at lizards, then had ice cream at Cohn’s Cones (my Cohn’s Cones koan: Does a hot dog have a Buddha nature? Hers: What is the sound of one cone dripping?). Sunday night, Ahmad went for sushi with a clutch of conservatives, remnants of a once-powerful cabal of Republican advisers, displaced by the warming of the Cold War. They still got together to drink sake and make jokes about Nancy Reagan’s astrologer.
Andi was starting school in a week, so she and I were at her closet going through her clothes. When my phone rang, she ran to my room, wearing only her tights, Mary Janes, and day-of-the-week underwear. To retrieve my phone, I thought; in fact, to answer it.
Hello, she said, before I could take the phone from her. She must have thought it was Ahmad. I shook my head. No! She listened a moment, then handed me the phone, disappointed.
Who is this? Romei asked.
Hello? I said. It’s Shira.
Who is this child who answer the phone?
My daughter, I said.
Not that it’s any of your business, I thought.
You have a daughter? I know nothing about a daughter. How old is this daughter? What is this daughter name?
Andrea, she’s seven, almost eight.
Silence.
The name of your husband?
I am happily single, I said.
Silence.
She is healthy, this Andrea? (He pronounced it in the Italian style: Ahn-drey-ah.)
Very.
Long silence.
I may speak to her?
Weirdo.
I looked at her, my sweet, beautiful thing with her straggly braids and impatient expression.
Mo-om, she said. I’m tired! It’s time for bed!
It was an hour before Andi’s bedtime. I put up a finger—one moment.
Maybe some day she tell her friends she talk to Nobel laureate.
Make it quick, I said.
Andi accepted the phone with a quizzical look.
Who is this? she said.
I tried to move my ear toward the phone, but Andi turned away and started nodding seriously, as if Romei could see her. Okay, she said finally and handed me the phone.
What did you say to her? I asked.
Andi put her hands on her hips.
Mo-om! she said.
She is very intelligent, this Andrey-a.
I wasn’t sure if this was a statement or a question. I assumed the former, though she hadn’t said a word. Maybe when dealing with Romei this was a sign of intelligence.
Of course, I said, and looked at her proudly. Very intelligent.
She rolled her eyes again, and plopped onto the bed with a humph.
So you may tell me about Vita Nuova, please.
Vita Nuova? What do you want to know? and gave Andi a look that said, Patience, my precious.
Whatever seem relevant, he said.
Deep breath. Was he testing me? Would I really have to sing for my supper?
Vita Nuova …, I said. I’d discoursed on the topic just a few days before, but now, talking with the Great Man, my mind was a blank.
College fund, braces, Barbie Dream Palace.
Vita Nuova poses a number of problems for the conscientious translator …
Bah! Romei said. I am caring nothing for this! What is making you feel, this book?
Andi was holding a dress up to her front, a frilly one she knew I hated.
Feel? I asked stupidly. I don’t feel anything when I translate.
This I think is not true. I think you are not liking this work.
Devil!
I like it okay.
Miss Greene, if we are to work together we must be making one agreement.
Yes?
Andi was swirling pirouettes, dancing with her frilly dress. I smiled.
Just one minute, I whispered to her.
Full disclosure!
Full disclosure?
Yes! Full disclosure. You don’t like this libello, is okay! We are friends now, you tell me.
I don’t know …
You do not like. I know this.
; Okay. You’re right: I don’t like Vita Nuova. Dante says his book is about love, but as far as I’m concerned, he knows nothing about love! He never gets close to Beatrice! He stares at her, he worships her, when he’s very lucky, she says hello. He’s in love with an idea, not a person! Love is something he experiences only in his imagination.
You think love is not something we experience in the imagination?
You know what it reminds me of? I said, ignoring his question. It reminds me of poets who translate other poets, not because they’re interested in the original, but because they want to turn it into something that looks like them. Dante says his world revolves around Beatrice, but in fact, it revolves around him—his longing, his words, his precious emotions. You can’t be faithful if you think only of yourself.
You think fidelity is possible? he asked.
In a translator or a man? I said before I realized what I was saying.
Either, he replied. Both.
Andi was making a show now of picking up her good school dresses one by one with two fingers and letting them drop, like smelly garbage, into the give-away pile.
I shook my head at her and crossed the living room to the study.
You mean absolute fidelity? I asked, as I sat on the loveseat. Pure translation, pure unwavering love? Of course not. There’s always a rupture, always an abandonment. The translated one is always betrayed.
Yes, he said. I am reading this essay—how you put it—of the traduttore/traditore.
I blushed. He was referring to the essay, published when I quit grad school, in which I railed about the impossibility of translation, the age-old notion that she who translates is both translator and traitor. I waited for the obvious: If you hate Dante and you don’t believe in translation, why did I hire you? Instead, he said, And why you think he do this, Miss Greene?
This?
Why you think he not get close to Beatrice?
Is it important?
To me, yes it is.
I think he cares more about his Beatrice poems than he does about Beatrice. He cares about art, not love. Vita Nuova is not a romance, it’s a manifesto explaining Dante’s shift from lyric to narrative.
I think is not this. He not get close to Beatrice because he is fearful, as you say. Of rupture, abandonment, betrayal. Is simple.
Maybe, I said, though I’d never found psychological analysis all that compelling. And thought: Fancy words for a guy who speaks only pizza-man English.
And the new life, Miss Greene? What are you thinking? What is this?
Andi had arrived in the study and was doing jumping jacks in front of the loveseat.
The new life? I asked, trying not to laugh. Grad students everywhere, footnote on the apex of the ridge of the postmodernist canon.
Yes, what are you thinking?
It’s not clear what Dante means by new life, is it? I said. As you know, the Italian words vita nuova don’t appear anywhere in the text, just the Latin vita nova. You remember the first lines: “In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, one finds a heading that says, Incipit vita nova. Under that heading I find written the words that I intend to transcribe in this little book—if not all, then at least those that are significant.”
I recited the lines in Italian, to show him I could.
Some say this new life refers to a sexual or moral awakening in boyhood. Others say it refers to a shift of poetics occurring in mid-life.
Yes, Miss Greene, he said impatiently, but what is your feeling?
My feeling? I asked.
This is what I am asking.
I think we have to credit Dante with his new life precisely when the text announces it, which is to say, when he first encounters Beatrice. But a new life at eight and three-quarters can hardly be new to an author of thirty. Or can it? Can a “new” life span an entire lifetime? What kind of “new life” is that? The new life, we realize, coincides with the onset of memory. Before it, little can be recalled; after, much is remembered. Memory equals awareness of self in time—self plunged into narrative, if you will, self become both object and observing subject. For Dante, then, the new life is nothing less than the life of consciousness—activated by love, empowered by imagination, moderated by reason. Understood this way, a new life experienced in childhood can still be new at mid-life.
Andi stopped jumping and stood over me.
Very interesting, Miss Greene. And what do you think?
I was still congratulating myself on a well-delivered monologue and impressive punchline.
I just told you what I think. What do you mean?
Precisely what I say: What do you think?
What do I personally think about the new life?
This is what I ask.
I think Dante’s new life is a fairy tale, something for children to believe in.
I love fairy tales, Andi said, but I don’t believe in them.
What do you mean by this? Romei asked.
Dante believes we choose new life: if we’re ready to walk the straight and narrow, we can leave our old life behind and achieve salvation. I don’t think so. Stuff happens. People get sick, they win the lottery. But they don’t change.
You think Dante believe that people change?
Of course! Why else would he switch to story-telling? Lyric poems are about the moment, but stories are about change. Dante changes as a result of his encounters with Beatrice, he becomes a better man, a salvageable man, or so he would have us believe.
Look, Mambo, my baby said, bringing her face to mine. I think a tooth is loose. A molar!
GO! I whisper-shouted. Back to your room!
Beatrice isn’t real, I added, so she doesn’t have to change. An idea can be perfect forever.
Andi stomped out of the room.
Very good, Romei said. Thank you. I send tomorrow.
11
SLEEPING WITH NANCY DREW
I had been talking rather a lot about Vita Nuova, but it had been sixteen years since I’d read it. My copies were all in Ahmad’s storage locker, together with other reminders of times past. It wasn’t a place I liked to visit.
I returned to Andi’s room. She was lying on top of her bed, reading Nancy Drew.
We’ll finish this later, I said, gesturing at the pile of clothes on the floor. In the meantime, pajamas.
Mmm, she replied.
I’m going to the basement, I said. Ahmad’s home from dinner; he’s in his studio. When I get back, bedtime.
Mmm, my daughter said, so I took a deep breath and the elevator down to the basement, where I found Vita Nuova and my translation together with three binders of notes from a box underneath six others. Which meant I had to open the other boxes and leaf through them—college papers so full of critical jargon I couldn’t understand them, mementos from a trip to Greece, matchbooks from my wedding. Divorce decree, receipt from the Delhi hotel where Andi had been conceived, baby clothes too precious to part with, early drafts of stories, a topographical map of northern India, the latter a reminder of the road not taken: Dharamsala, my destination interruptus when I found myself with child.
In another box: mementos from my freshman year of high school, which I spent in Rome, during my father’s second sabbatical. My yearbook, for example, which contained the only photos I had left of T. In his senior picture, he sits, smugly, in a rattan chair, his girlfriend of four years on his lap, even though she didn’t go to our school—that’s how inseparable they were considered to be. In Lavinia’s ears, glinting in the black and white sun, fat diamond earrings, gift of her movie producer papa. In the second shot, candid this time, T. leans against a Roman column smoking a cigarette. You can’t see what he looks at through his Ray-Bans—it’s off-camera, and away from the ruin that entrances the rest of the class. For years, I hoped it was me he looked at so possessively; I was in that art history class, I was on that field trip, wherever it was. I’ll never know, nor will I ever be sure that the boy in the semi-distance, with the flood
water pants and Indian mirrored manbag, is Ahmad, giving T. the evil eye. Ahmad knew about us, somehow; I never knew how.
Also, photos of Ahmad and me that same year. The dynamic duo doing all the great poses: cross-dressing American Gothic, Shira pursing her lips, Ahmad holding a devil’s trident. Sistine Chapel redux—our fingers almost touching, Ahmad wearing rubber gloves, Shira’s nails painted dark against a bright white sky. Impossibly young, and happy. We didn’t know yet how it would be: fighting that spring over T., reconciling after my divorce, words spoken when he blamed me for Jonah’s death, reconciling again over Andi. And there she was, our red-faced baby, sleeping in my exhausted arms. Dribbling carrot in her high chair, smiling a demented orange smile, Ahmad behind her, brandishing a spoon. Aunt Emma trying to smile over Andi’s stroller, managing only to look disapproving, Andi raising her hands and face to the sky as if blessing the host.
Also, photos I discovered when my father died, too small, their edges white and scalloped, from our first sabbatical—of my father, complacent, Eleanor, my mother, laughing, Shira, seven, wearing an orange Danskin shirt-and-shorts set, distracted always by something outside the frame. My mother, her eyes shaded by cat glasses, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, pointing at the Pantheon; I, crouching at her feet, conversing with pigeons, in the background reading a book, smiling fiercely above a decapitated statue. My father, the photographer, Eleanor his object, I there only incidentally: because her arm encircles me (I seem uncomfortable, suspicious), because I squat in her shadow, privately playing.
There were no photos after that year, no photos after she left us.
Feeling too tender, I carted the volumes, notes, and binders to my study, where I found Tinky Winky sitting on a stack of Italian dictionaries.
Had he been there before?
Are you in exile again? Just like Dante! Look! and I showed him an Italian edition of Vita Nuova, a rumpled Garzanti with its outdated bibliography and puzzling snippet of Giotto’s Life of Maria and Life of Christ on the cover. Inside, an engraving of the Poet in Profile, his arrogant, heavy-lidded expression, his laurel wreath, his ever-present snood.
I know! I said. He’s insufferable!
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