“Yes, I am, apparently. Too bad for me. What you’ve told me breaks my heart. I don’t want anything to happen to you, I want you to go on doing every mean thing in the world to me. Can I help you somehow? I’ll do whatever you ask. Because I still love you with all my heart, bad girl.”
She laughed again.
“At least I still have those cheap, sentimental things you say,” she exclaimed. “I’ll call you so you can bring me oranges in jail.”
4
The Dragoman of Château Meguru
Salomón Toledano boasted of speaking twelve languages and being able to interpret all of them in both directions. He was a short, thin little man, half lost in baggy suits that looked as if he bought them too big intentionally, and he had tortoise-like eyes hovering between wakefulness and sleep. His hair was thinning, and he shaved only every two or three days, so there was always a grayish shadow staining his face. No one looking at him—so unprepossessing, the perfect nobody—could have imagined the extraordinary facility he had in learning languages and his phenomenal aptitude for interpreting. International and transnational organizations, as well as governments, argued over him, but he never accepted a permanent position because as a freelancer he felt more liberated and earned more money. Not only was he the best interpreter I had met in all the years I earned a living practicing the “profession of phantoms”—that’s what he called it—but he was also the most original.
Everyone admired and envied him, but very few of our colleagues liked him. They were annoyed by his loquacity, his lack of tact, his childishness, and the avidity with which he monopolized the conversation. He spoke in an ostentatious and sometimes crude manner, because although he knew the generalities of languages, he was ignorant of local nuances, tones, and usages, which often made him seem dull or coarse. But he could be entertaining, recounting anecdotes and memories of his family and his travels around the world. I was fascinated by his personality—that of a childish genius—and since I spent hours listening to him, he developed a fair amount of esteem for me. Whenever we met in the interpreters’ booths at some conference or congress, I knew I’d have Salomón Toledano sticking to me like a leech.
He had been born into a Ladino-speaking Sephardic family from Smyrna, and for that reason he considered himself “more Spaniard than Turk, though with a five-century lag.” His father must have been a very prosperous businessman and banker because he sent Salomón to study in private schools in Switzerland and England and to attend universities in Boston and Berlin. Before obtaining his degrees he already spoke Turkish, Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German, and after specializing in Romanic and Germanic philology, he lived for some years in Tokyo and Taiwan, where he learned Japanese, Mandarin, and the Taiwanese dialect. With me he always spoke a chewed-over and slightly archaic Spanish in which, for example, he gave us “interpreters” the name “dragomans.” That was why we nicknamed him the Dragoman. Sometimes, without realizing it, he passed from Spanish to French or English, or to more exotic languages, and then I had to interrupt and ask that he confine himself to my limited (compared to his) linguistic world. When I met him he was learning Russian, and after a year of effort he read and spoke it more fluently than I, who had spent five years scrutinizing the mysteries of the Cyrillic alphabet.
Though he generally translated into English, when necessary he also interpreted into French, Spanish, and other languages, and I always marveled at the fluency of his expression in my language in spite of his never having lived in a Spanish-speaking country. He wasn’t a man who read very much, and he wasn’t especially interested in culture except for grammar books and dictionaries, and unusual pastimes like collecting stamps and toy soldiers, subjects in which he said he was as well versed as in languages. The most extraordinary thing was to hear him speak Japanese, because then, like a true chameleon but without being aware of it, he adopted the postures, bows, and gestures of an Asian. Thanks to him, I discovered that the predisposition for languages is as mysterious as the inclination of certain people for mathematics or music and has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge. It is something separate, a gift that some possess and others don’t. Salomón Toledano’s was so developed that in spite of his inoffensive, innocuous air, he seemed outrageous to his colleagues. Because when it wasn’t a question of languages, he was so undefended in his ingenuousness that he was a man-child.
We had met earlier for reasons having to do with work, but our friendship really was born during the time in my life when I had lost contact once again with the bad girl. Her separation from David Richardson was catastrophic when he proved to the court hearing the suit for divorce that Mrs. Richardson was a bigamist, for she was also married legally in France to a functionary at the Quai d’Orsay, whom she had never divorced. The bad girl, seeing that the battle was lost, chose to escape England and the hated horses of Newmarket, destination unknown. But she passed through Paris—at least, that’s what she wanted me to believe—and in March 1974 she called to say goodbye from the new Charles de Gaulle Airport. She told me things had gone very badly for her, her ex-husband had won in every sense of the word, and, sick to death of courts and lawyers who made the little money she had disappear, she was going where no one could try her patience any further.
“If you want to stay in Paris, my house is yours,” I told her in all seriousness. “And if you want to marry again, we’ll get married. I don’t give a damn if you’re a bigamist or a trigamist.”
“Stay in Paris so Monsieur Robert Arnoux can denounce me to the police or do something worse? I’m not that crazy. Thanks anyway, Ricardito. We’ll see each other again, when the storm passes.”
Knowing she wouldn’t tell me, I asked where she was going and what she planned to do now with her life.
“I’ll tell you the next time we see each other. Here’s a kiss, and don’t cheat on me too much with the Frenchwomen.”
I was sure this time too that I’d never hear from her again. As I had the previous times, I made the firm resolution, at the age of thirty-eight, to fall in love with someone less evasive and complicated, a normal girl with whom I could have a relationship free of unexpected alarms, maybe even marry and have children. But that didn’t happen, because in this life things rarely happen the way we little pissants plan them.
I soon was in a routine of work that bored me at times but wasn’t unpleasant. I thought being an interpreter was an innocuous profession, but one that also posed few moral problems to the person who practiced it. And it allowed me to travel, earn a decent amount of money, and take time off when I wanted to.
My only contact with Peru, for by now I rarely saw Peruvians in Paris, continued to be the increasingly desperate letters from Uncle Ataúlfo. Aunt Dolores always sent me regards in her own hand, and from time to time I would send her scores, for playing the piano was the great diversion in her invalid’s life. Uncle Ataúlfo said that the eight years of General Velasco Alvarado’s military dictatorship, with its nationalizations, agrarian reform, industrial collectivization, and state control of the economy, had provided erroneous solutions to the problems of social injustice, inequality, and the exploitation of the majority by a privileged minority, and this had served only to inflame and further impoverish everyone, frighten away investments, eradicate savings, and increase unrest and violence. Though populism had been reined in somewhat in the second stage of the dictatorship, led during its last four years by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, newspapers and television and radio stations were still state controlled, political life nullified, and there was no hint that democracy would be reestablished. The bitterness distilled in Uncle Ataúlfo’s letters made me sorry for him and other Peruvians of his generation who, when they reached old age, saw their lifelong dream of Peru making progress fade instead of materialize. Peruvian society was sinking deeper and deeper into poverty, ignorance, and brutality. I had done the right thing by coming to Europe, even though my life as an obscure dragoman was somew
hat solitary.
I was also losing interest in current French politics, which I once followed passionately. In the seventies, during the governments of Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing, I barely read the day’s news. In the daily and weekly papers I turned almost exclusively to the cultural pages. I always went to art shows and concerts but less to the theater, which had degenerated a good deal in comparison with the previous decade, though I did go to the movies, sometimes twice a week. Happily, Paris was still a paradise for cinephiles. With regard to literature, I was no longer up-to-date because, like the theater, the novel and essay had taken a nosedive in France. I never could read with enthusiasm the intellectual idols of those years, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and others whose verbose books dropped from my hands, except for Michel Foucault. His history of madness had a powerful effect on me, as did his essay on the prison system (Surveiller et punir), though I wasn’t convinced by his theory that the history of western Europe was one of multiple institutionalized repressions—prisons, hospitals, gender, the police, laws—by a power that colonized every area of liberty in order to annihilate dissent and nonconformity. In fact, during those years I read dead authors for the most part, especially the Russians.
I was always very busy working and doing other things, but in the seventies, when I examined my life, trying to be objective, for the first time it seemed sterile and my future that of a confirmed bachelor and outsider who would never be truly integrated into his beloved France. And I always thought of Salomón Toledano’s sudden apocalyptic observation when, one day in the interpreters’ room at UNESCO, he asked, “If we suddenly felt ourselves dying and asked ourselves, ‘What trace of our passage through this dog’s life of drudgery will we leave behind?,’ the honest answer would be: ‘None, we haven’t done anything except speak for other people.’ Otherwise, what does it mean to have translated millions of words and not remember a single one of them, because not a single one deserved to be remembered?” It wasn’t strange that the Dragoman was unpopular among people in the profession.
One day I told him I hated him because that sentence, which came back to me from time to time, had convinced me of the total uselessness of my existence.
“We dragomans are merely useless, dear friend,” he consoled me. “But we don’t harm anyone with our work. In every other profession great damage can be done to the species. Think about lawyers and doctors, for example, not to mention architects and politicians.”
We were having a beer in a bistrot on Avenue de Suffren after a day of work at UNESCO, which was holding its annual conference. In an attack of confidentiality, I had just told him, without specific details or names, that for many years I had been in love with a woman who came and went in my life like a will-o’-the-wisp, lighting it up with happiness for short periods of time and then leaving it dry, sterile, immune to any other enthusiasm or love.
“Falling in love is a mistake,” was Salomón Toledano’s judgment, echoing my vanished friend Juan Barreto, who shared that philosophy but without my colleague’s verbal mannerisms. “Grab the woman by her hair and drag her to bed. Make her see all the stars in the firmament as quick as a wink. That’s the correct theory. I cannot practice it, hélas, on account of my weak physique. Once I tried to play macho with a wild woman and she wrecked my face with a single slap. Which is why, despite my thesis, I treat ladies, above all prostitutes, as if they were queens.”
“I don’t believe you’ve never been in love, Dragoman.”
He acknowledged falling in love once in his life, when he was a university student in Berlin. With a Polish girl, so Catholic that every time they made love she cried with remorse. The Dragoman proposed. The girl accepted. It was a tremendous effort for them to obtain their families’ blessings. They managed it after a complicated negotiation in which they decided on a double wedding, one Jewish, the other Catholic. In the midst of preparations for the wedding, without warning the bride ran off with an American officer who had concluded his service in Berlin. The Dragoman, maddened by despair, engaged in a strange inquisition: he burned his magnificent collection of stamps. And decided he would never fall in love again. In the future, love for him would be purely mercenary. He kept his word. After that episode, he frequented only prostitutes. And instead of stamps, now he collected toy soldiers.
A few days later, thinking he was doing me a favor, he involved me in a weekend trip with two Russian courtesans who, according to him, would not only allow me to practice my Russian but would introduce me to the “emanations and bruises of Slavic love.” We went for supper to Le Grand Samovar, a restaurant in Batignolles, and then to a narrow, dark, suffocatingly smoky boîte de nuit near Place de Clichy, where we met the nymphs. We drank a good deal of vodka, so that my memories blurred almost from the time we walked into the cave called Les Cosaques, and the only thing I remember clearly was that of the two Russians, fate, or I should say the Dragoman, gave me Natasha, the fatter and more heavily made-up of the two Rubenesque women in their forties. My companion was stuffed into a brilliant pink dress with net trim, and when she laughed or moved, her tits shook like belligerent balloons. She looked like an escapee from a painting by Botero. Until my memory vanished into an alcoholic mist, my friend talked like a parrot in a Russian larded with obscenities, which the two courtesans celebrated with loud laughter.
The next morning I awoke with an aching head and sore bones: I had slept on the floor at the foot of the bed where the supposed Natasha was snoring, fully dressed and wearing her shoes. By day she was even fatter than at night. She slept placidly until noon, and when she awoke she looked in astonishment at the room, the bed she was occupying, and me, who wished her good afternoon. She immediately demanded three thousand francs, about six hundred dollars at the time, which is what she charged for a full night. I had nothing like that much money and an unpleasant discussion ensued in which I finally convinced her to take all the cash I had with me, which came to half that amount, and some little porcelain figures that adorned the room. She left, shouting curses, and I spent a long time under the shower, swearing never again to engage in this kind of dragomanic adventure.
When I told Salomón Toledano about my nocturnal fiasco, he said that by contrast he and his friend had made love until they passed out in a display of strength worthy of pages in The Guinness Book of World Records. He never dared propose to me another nocturnal excursion with exotic ladies.
What distracted me and occupied many of my hours in those final years of the seventies were the stories of Chekhov in particular and Russian literature in general. I never had considered doing literary translations because I knew they were very badly paid in every language, and surely worse in Spanish than in others. But in 1976 or 1977, through a mutual friend, I met a Spanish publisher, Mario Muchnik, at UNESCO, and we became friends. When he learned I knew Russian and was very fond of reading, he encouraged me to prepare a small anthology of Chekhov’s stories, which I had raved to him about, assuring him that Chekhov was as good a storywriter as he was a dramatist, though the mediocre translations of his stories meant he was not valued very highly as a narrator. Muchnik was an interesting case. Born in Argentina, he studied sciences and began a career as a researcher and academic but soon abandoned it to devote himself to publishing, his secret passion. He was a publisher by vocation, for he loved books and published only good literature, which, he said, guaranteed him all the failure in the world, financially speaking, but the greatest personal satisfaction. He spoke of the books he brought out with an enthusiasm so contagious that, after thinking about it for a while, I accepted his offer to translate an anthology of Chekhov’s stories, for which I requested unlimited time. “You have it,” he said, “and besides, even though you earn a pittance, you’ll have more fun than a pig in mud.”
It took a very long time, but I did, in fact, enjoy myself, reading all of Chekhov, choosing his most beautiful stories, and bringing them over into Spanish. It was more delicate than translating the speeches and papers t
o which I was accustomed in my work. I felt less ghostlike as a literary translator than I did as an interpreter. I had to make decisions, explore Spanish searching for nuances and cadences that corresponded to the semantic subtleties and tonalities—the marvelous art of allusion and elusion in Chekhov’s prose—and to the rhetorical sumptuousness of Russian literary language. A real pleasure to which I devoted entire Saturdays and Sundays. I sent Mario Muchnik the promised anthology almost two years after he hired me. I’d had such a good time with it that I almost didn’t accept the check he sent as my fee. “Perhaps this will be enough for you to buy a nice edition of some good writer, Chekhov, for example,” he said.
When, sometime later, I received copies of the anthology, I gave one, with a dedication, to Salomón Toledano. We had a drink together occasionally, and sometimes I went with him to shops that sold toy soldiers, or to philatelic or antiquarian stores, which he inspected thoroughly though he rarely bought anything. He thanked me for the book but advised energetically against my continuing on this “very dangerous path.”
“Your livelihood is at risk,” he warned. “A literary translator aspires to be a writer; that is, he’s a frustrated pencil pusher. Somebody who’ll never be resigned to disappearing into his work, as good interpreters do. Don’t renounce your status as a nonexistent gentleman, dear friend, unless you wish to end up a clochard.”
Contrary to my belief that polyglots owed their skill to a good musical ear, Salomón Toledano didn’t have the slightest interest in music. In his apartment in Neuilly I didn’t even see a phonograph. His excellent ear was tuned specifically for languages. He told me that in Smyrna, Turkish and Spanish—well, Ladino, which he had shaken off completely during a summer in Salamanca—were spoken interchangeably in his family, and that he inherited his linguistic aptitude from his father, who could speak half a dozen languages, which was very useful in his business. Ever since he was a boy he had dreamed of traveling, visiting cities, and that had been the great incentive for his learning languages, thanks to which he became what he was now: a citizen of the world. That same nomadic vocation made him the precocious stamp collector he had been until his traumatic engagement in Berlin. Collecting stamps was another way of visiting countries, of learning geography and history.
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