He couldn’t speak Spanish fluently, and it seems he chose to give his presentation in English because he didn’t trust his embassy staff’s Spanish. Even less so the Argentinian interpreters’ Japanese, however nikkei they were. The Nichia Gakuin bilingual school had only just been set up, so my colleagues then didn’t have the skill level they have nowadays. He complained that his Western translators used far too many glosses, scattering them all over the place to fill in the gaps they left along the way. All of which prevented them from keeping the flow of speech. In other words, from accepting what is untranslatable to concentrate on what is translatable.
To top it all off, they had offered me the job practically at the last minute. I wasn’t sure whether to agree: it was a weekend and I’d promised Ari I would take him to the movies. But the organizers thought I was playing hard to get and so they offered me almost twice the normal rate, and then I couldn’t refuse. I called my ex and we negotiated. Since we got back from London, Emilio and I had made a pact. If one of us had the chance to earn good money, the other would step up, because it was in our son’s interests. So my meeting Yoshie really was purely accidental. Well, not accidental. More precisely it came down to cash, like everything else in this world.
Translating English into Spanish for a Japanese guy who considers himself a polyglot is pretty close to my worst nightmare. I wouldn’t recommend it to any colleague with a fragile disposition. Generally speaking, there’s nothing more difficult than interpreting for someone who thinks they know the target language. They get suspicious about simple things, confuse decisions for slipups, try to correct you and make the problem twice as bad. Yoshie was particularly stubborn that morning. He didn’t raise any direct objections to my translations, that wasn’t his style. The opposite of Argentinian men, he was more lethal silent than when he spoke. And yet each time I took the microphone, he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and pulled a face.
I felt so nervous it took me a while to realize that, with the utmost discretion, Yoshie was checking out my legs under the table. When a guy does that, you have two choices. If you don’t fancy him (which is usually the case), you take offense and make that instantly clear to him. And if you are attracted to him, you can’t help but feel flattered, so you let him keep looking for a bit before you react. To calm myself and regain control of the translation, I tried a variation of the last option. I raised my thigh and crossed my legs firmly. Then I pushed back from the table so he could see me better, given that he was so interested. He responded by letting out an embarrassed little cough, averting his eyes, and gazing up at the ceiling. It was then I knew I would ask him for a coffee as soon as we had finished.
The sun was still high when we stepped out into the street. I remember thinking: How funny, leaving a hotel together even before our first date. It was a kind of premonitory joke.
We exchanged polite trivialities in English as we headed toward Santa Fe. There I suggested we catch a bus to take a walk in the Botanical Garden. Or better still, in a slightly ridiculous gesture of intercultural courtesy, to the Japanese Gardens. Yoshie smiled at me and said, I here. That was his way of saying that he preferred new places. Buses here scare me, he added. Buses go very fast. A man who tells you this, I thought, has to be gentle.
We walked a few blocks and turned onto Callao. I paused to look in the window of the Clásica y Moderna bookshop, which was teeming with books by authors who had been banned or had just returned from exile. We went in to buy some book or other, I wish I could remember what it was. The idea was to head to Avenida Corrientes, which in those days was practically a must. We ended up stopping off at a little café before we got there.
As ever, I downed several espressos. He drank tea terribly slowly. I was struck by the fact that he avoided coffee. In Buenos Aires that’s tantamount to a diplomatic incident. Unlike the English, we can barely differentiate between proper tea and an herbal infusion. I tried to explain to him that here coffee is an act of speech. A way to strike up a conversation with a stranger. Like drinking maté but not as intimate, you could say.
Yoshie told me that, compared to tea, he found coffee less interesting. It didn’t encourage reflection. He had drunk it in Paris because, well, that was Paris. But coffee didn’t actually make conversing any easier for him, as he drank it so quickly, and it left a strange taste in his mouth.
When he said that, I got up and went to brush my teeth and freshen my lipstick. By the time I got back to the table, he had paid and was staring at me.
As Ari had gone to sleep over at his father’s place, we continued talking, and all the rest, well into the night.
* * *
Yoshie was a little hesitant about sharing the metal straw we use for drinking maté. It just so happens that we didn’t need to drink maté to feel at ease. Before I knew it, we were sleeping together practically every weekend. I immediately got into the habit of calling him Yo, the perfect nickname for a narcissist who worked at a company called Me. He laughed, but was slightly annoyed. How can I be a narcissist if I work all day long? he asked. Darling, I replied, do you have any idea what narcissism is? Anyway, I also loved the way his name had two personas, Yo-She. Yo and his other self. His inner female.
For the first few months, we spoke in English. He felt more comfortable with that, and it was the language in which we had first met. I think both of us imagined we might stop fancying the other if we switched languages. Although I was used to translating, my partners had all been Spanish speakers. I soon noticed that my reflexes were different in English. Like when you want to say one word and another comes out, or you’re following a map, take a wrong turn, and suddenly find yourself in a more interesting place.
Yoshie on the other hand did know what it was like to date bilingually. He knew what it meant to live with the impossibility of explaining your feelings precisely. Gradually, we started to communicate in Spanish. Because of the way he constructed his sentences, I always got the feeling he was translating himself. I don’t think he was quite ready to have an identity in my language. He preferred to think in the one where he felt more at ease, and to subtitle his thoughts as best he could.
Smartphones would have really come in handy! Or not, who knows. We might have found ourselves trapped in some sort of metadiscourse, looking up word after word, utterly incapable of moving the conversation along. I remember he always laughed when we said chin-chin. He told me what it meant in Japanese. And to this day, whenever I clink glasses with someone, I can’t help thinking of a nice dick.
Regardless of the language we used, I realized we had different understandings of the same expressions. This even applied to basic vocabulary so that, almost unwittingly, the relationship gradually gave rise to a whole code of ambiguities. It aroused my desire to interpret him. Every gap in his speech became a turn-on.
Ultimately, translation requires an element of attraction. You desire their voice. You recognize yourself in a stranger. And both are transformed. Doesn’t loving someone also include making their words your own? You struggle to understand, and you misinterpret. The other person’s meaning bumps up against the limits of your experience. For things to work with someone, you have to accept that you won’t be able to get them perfectly. That, even with the best of intentions, you’re going to manipulate them.
In the same way that we translators leave our mark in the mistakes we make, Yoshie and I revealed ourselves in our misunderstandings. It happened whenever we argued. We each lost the thread of the other and retreated into our own frame of reference.
We used to compare the three languages he’d learned. He had genuine respect for English. There’s no doubt it was the one he was most fluent in. He spoke it fast, with mechanical precision, and a kind of gringo accent that I found amusing. French was still close to his heart, perhaps because it was the language with which he first set off on his travels. His first foreign identity. Yoshie spent two hours a day studying Spanish. I wouldn’t say he ended up speaking it incredibly
well, but proficiently enough, yes. He had great difficulty writing it, but his reading skills were quite good. I would occasionally lend him novels by Argentinian authors. Mysteriously, they looked newer when he returned them.
He used to tell me that Western grammar had upset his concept of time and of things. If I understood correctly, Japanese nouns are invariable, with no indication of gender or number. Which means that for a Japanese speaker things don’t change according to circumstance. They are what they are. They may combine with other things, but they retain the same form. Isn’t that well on its way to being a political statement? Yoshie had problems with definite and indefinite articles. Sometimes he got them mixed up, other times he would simply leave them out. Can you give me glass of wine? he would say. His glass of wine sounded to me like a concept, an absolute category. A more lasting pleasure.
Another habit of his that has become fixed in my mind was the way he stressed words. He would emphasize each syllable with a sort of diplomacy, as if to avoid favoring one inflection over another. This gave his speech a slightly disjointed tone. Each of his sentences resembled an inventory or a scale, and I wasn’t quite sure where it would end. So I listened, waiting for the next sound.
His habit of never quite saying yes or no both intrigued and, in some ways, excited me. He gave the impression (and this motivated me to persuade him) that his desires were made of a very fine, reversible material. Like a woman’s stocking. Yo derived pleasure from those interconnecting vessels between wanting and not wanting something, between accepting and refusing. My acquaintances found him a little exasperating. Where I saw insinuation, they read indecision.
He tried to explain to me the tricky little word hai. It’s roughly equivalent to our ajá, like giving a nod of assent. Japanese speakers need to tack something else on to it, so that you know for sure that they are saying yes. To provide added emphasis. For example: Yes, I agree with you. Or: Yes, I promise I will do such and such. In Yoshie’s opinion this was clearer than our version, when we simply say yes or no, and then only afterwards start to think about it.
He was always getting usted and vos mixed up. It was completely beyond him why ustedes is the plural of usted, whereas vosotros isn’t the plural of vos. Go live in Spain! I would say to him as a joke. And guess what, he ended up in Madrid. If I understood him correctly, when you speak to someone in Japanese you have to employ several virtually untranslatable forms of address. Besides being casual or polite, you can also place the other person higher, lower, who knows what else. I imagine that having so many different ways of addressing someone creates a complex interlocutor. Others within the other.
However, what confounded him most were the verb tenses. From what I can remember, Japanese has a past and a nonpast. Two poles separated by an abyss! I see this as an example of how grammar conditions the memory of its speakers. The very concept of a nonpast blew me away. An entire country could fall down that hole.
* * *
Yoshie first lived on Avenida del Libertador, in one of those apartments that seem to float above the city and have no wish to be part of it. He quickly grew tired of living there, and wanted to find a neighborhood with more of a past. This isn’t Paris, I mocked him. At last, he found a large, refurbished mansion in San Telmo. Near the old market, on Calle Perú. Funnily enough, only a couple of blocks from the Nikkei Federation, which didn’t exist at the time.
The house was delightful, with those hardwood doors, high ceilings, and corridors that are typical of the neighborhood. He rented it from the descendant of Japanese immigrants. A guy from Burzaco who had made a fortune in the textile industry. No, wait a minute, that was someone else. He came from Escobar, from a family of flower growers or something. I remember clearly the guy’s surname, Fukuyo, because I made crude jokes about it. Yoshie couldn’t understand why we found oriental names so hilarious. He said we never laughed at English or French ones.
He told me that in the countries where he had lived before, he hadn’t really become involved with the Japanese community. He was afraid that if he did, he would find it more difficult to assimilate. And he didn’t see the sense in traveling halfway across the world just to live as if you hadn’t moved an inch. What he never foresaw was the number of Japanese tourists who came to visit San Telmo. And so it was here, in this distant land, that Yo ended up reconnecting with his people. He started to sponsor various cultural projects. That was how I got to know several translators. He couldn’t believe how well he got on with the Argentinian nikkei. Maybe because, deep down, they all felt much more Japanese than they’d imagined. Or because none of them were a hundred percent Japanese.
He also did good business with them, of course. He managed to get I don’t know how many subsidies out of the Japanese government. And, obviously, the nikkei community became huge fans of Me. Yo was amazed not to find any left-handed people. He was always hoping someone would sign a document with their left hand. In the end, I got on well with the nikkei. I can still remember several of them. The Nakandakaris, the Muratos, the Iwasakis. Lovely people. I found a video of some youngsters on YouTube recently who I thought might be their children. Or grandchildren!
If you ask me, he idealized New York too much. Especially when comparing it with Buenos Aires, which kind of got up my nose. We have good things here too. What can I say? In my book, skyscrapers are just phallic symbols. And to make things worse, he could never praise New York without mentioning that journalist chick, Laura, or Laurie, or whatever her name was. If she was so amazing, why did he leave her?
He was obsessed with collapsing borders. Imaginary ones, I mean. He wanted somehow to unite his cities, his languages, his scattered memories. He saw a connection in everything, a possible proximity between things that in theory were very far apart. He jumped from one reference to another like a kind of computer translator. And at times the results sounded as crazy as one of them. I think the poor guy needed to be in several places at once. He had the fantasy of intermingling, something that can lead you to solitude as much as exile.
People always referred to him as a Chink. Well-intentioned or not, here that’s what we call anyone whose eyes aren’t round. It made me feel really ashamed and mad at my friends. It didn’t exactly amuse him either, but he took it with a pinch of salt. Once or twice he told me that basically he deserved it. That every country should have the experience of being mistaken for its ancestral enemy.
Yo loved how familiar and touchy-feely we Argentinians are. But he also found it unnerving. If everyone can talk to you about anything and instantly become your friend, he said, how do you know who your real friends are? Until he trusted someone, he was usually quite reserved. He spoke very slowly and in a soft voice but he would have sudden moments of cheekiness, like the day we met. I’m sure that both things were related. After all, aren’t there some urges that only shy people have?
Our contrasting views about the sanctity of rules created a hint of friction. I’d already run into this problem when dealing with English people, but it was even worse with him. For Yoshie there was no such thing as an exception to the norm, or at least there shouldn’t be. That’s why he never thought about how to react to unexpected events, only how to avoid them at all costs (and in this, I have to admit, he was largely successful). For me, the unexpected is part of the plan, the exception is the rule.
Imagine what a headache it was for us to plan a weekend away. We would end up staying at home, or going to a restaurant where every option was at least printed in black-and-white, in perfect order. But even then the poor guy was hounded by exceptions, because I’d always ask if they could leave something off a dish or change an ingredient in a salad.
When he first moved to Buenos Aires, Yoshie would turn up so early for things that everyone thought he’d got the time wrong. For him, to arrive on time was to arrive late. With his economic reasoning, he wasn’t wrong. If you come to a meeting at the agreed hour, by the time you start work it’s always later than intended. That kind of time m
anagement only ever brought him frustration. He would spend whole days waiting, feeling offended, abandoned, God knows what else. He was accustomed to working in France and the States, where time is money. They don’t realize it’s the only thing we can all afford to spend.
What most intrigued me was that no matter how early you arrived at a rendezvous with him—and believe me, I went out of my way to surprise him—Yoshie was always there first. I don’t understand how he did it, with all the barricaded streets, the strikes, and the shambles we have here every day. Maybe he arranged various meetings in the same place. Several times I thought I saw someone leave his table as I came in. I’m the kind of person who thinks that excessively punctual people are hiding something. Sorry to sound skeptical, but I find any model behavior suspicious.
Yo’s punctilious habits reminded me of the psychos you see in movies. You know, those characters who seem so perfect, but then turn out to be monsters? In his case, though, this didn’t scare me, I was attracted to it. That’s often been my experience with tranquil men. I think they must have an energy that’s unleashed only in intimacy. I always preferred to sleep with the calm ones, because they know how to change gear. How can someone accelerate if they’re always living on the edge, at full throttle?
At his place he was capable of waking up hours before me, preparing breakfast and starting work without making a sound. I imagined he had to have very special hands to do all that. And even if that wasn’t really the case, the mere idea led me to feel it was true. That’s the way I am. I get into bed with my conjectures, and then take pleasure through auto-suggestion.
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