The Interpreter Read online

  PRAISE FOR DIEGO MARANI AND NEW FINNISH GRAMMAR

  ‘This is an extraordinary book, as good as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and with a similar mystery at its heart.’ Spectator

  ‘Beautifully written and translated, and beautifully original.’ The Times

  ‘This identity thriller delivers plot, bodies and clues—as well as poetic musings on national and individual identity. Marani is obsessed by language and how it defines us.’ Independent

  ‘Marani’s miraculous novel is profound, moving, elusive and tragic.’ Irish Times

  ‘This is a desperately sad book. It takes its place beside Romantic stories of Kaspar Hauser and the Wolf Boy of Aveyron, which have haunted the European imagination for two centuries…Judith Landry is to be congratulated on her seamless translation from the Italian.’ New Statesman

  ‘We soon forget we are reading an English translation of an Italian novel. Sheer narrative vim is one reason for this…What gives New Finnish Grammar its true interest, however, is its evocation of a place and language foreign to the author yet, to all appearances, intimately familiar.’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘I like the solitariness and separateness of the characters in New Finnish Grammar. Isolated personages sending to one another messages that may never even be read, let alone understood or answered—there should be more such stuff in fiction.’ Gerald Murnane

  ‘A thoroughly European sensibility: intellectual, melancholy, mysterious, imbued with a sense of tragedy and history.’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘It is wise and well crafted. Beautifully written—what a translation!’ Craig Sherborne on New Finnish Grammar

  PRAISE FOR DIEGO MARANI AND THE LAST OF THE VOSTYACHS

  ‘Diego Marani’s second novel to appear in English, in a dazzling translation from the Italian by Judith Landry, is a riot of comic unpredictability…The Last of the Vostyachs cleverly explores notions of freedom, possession and imprisonment—erudition keeping pace with a rollicking plot. Marani’s sentences are controlled explosions of impressionism, his narrative structure a thematic echo chamber.’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘So, we have: 1. An intellectual puzzle. 2. A wild man of nature adrift in a big city. 3. A policier set near the Arctic Circle. (If that alone doesn’t make you put down your copies of Fifty Shades of Whatever then I despair. It has that Killingesque atmosphere.) 4. Magic, and a sense of the immensity of the primeval universe. 5. An unmistakable dash of humour, even when your nerves are being shredded. 6. Wolves, and a Siberian tiger, let loose from a zoo. 7. A happy ending against all odds. And 8. All hanging together. When I reviewed New Finnish Grammar, I edged towards using the word “genius” to describe Marani. I’m doing so again now.’ Guardian

  ‘For Italian fiction in translation, there is nobody more important being published today. This is a beautiful, intelligently funny novel.’ Italia Magazine

  ‘Marani’s fascination with languages, and with the silencing of language in particular, permeates this captivating work.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘A roller-coaster ride whisking the reader alternatively through zones of darkness, hilarity, cruelty, tenderness, the near-lubricious…There’s something for almost everyone.’ PEN

  DIEGO MARANI was born in Ferrara in 1959. He has worked as a translator and policy officer for the European Commission and has written several other novels, collections of essays and short stories. He has been awarded the Campiello Prize, the Stresa Prize for The Last of the Vostyachs, and the Bruno Cavallini Prize. New Finnish Grammar received the Grinzane-Cavour Prize, was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award and the Best Translated Book Award, and was longlisted for the European Book Prize. Marani invented the mock language Europanto, in which he has written columns for European newspapers. In addition to the trilogy of stand-alone novels about language and identity, Text has also published Marani’s intriguing novel God’s Dog. Diego Marani lives in Brussels with his wife and two children.

  JUDITH LANDRY is a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture. Her translations include The Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani, The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte, A Bag of Marbles by Joseph Joffo, and Smarra & Trilby by Charles Nodier. In 2012, she was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for New Finnish Grammar.

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  The Text Publishing Company

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  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  L’Interprete © copyright Diego Marani 2004

  English translation copyright © Judith Landry 2015

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  First published in Italian as L’Interprete by Bompiani, 2004

  First published in the UK by Dedalus Books, 2016

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2016

  Cover design by W.H. Chong

  Page design by Imogen Stubbs

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Creator: Marani, Diego, author.

  Title: The Interpreter / by Diego Marani; translated from the Italian by Judith Landry.

  ISBN: 9781925240245 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922253057 (ebook)

  Dewey Number: 853.914

  Subjects: Man-woman relationships

  To Simona, Alessandro and Elisabetta

  In times to come,

  chaos will reign in Hell itself.

  SERBIAN PROVERB

  I

  This is the story of my undoing: of how one single man snatched me from those I loved, from my profession, from my private life, and bore me to my ruin, a prey to confusion and mind-befogging illness. Not that this was his callous aim: he couldn’t help himself. He simply failed to notice that he was dragging me into that self-same dizzying abyss into which he himself was hurtling. And it is this very fact that makes my torment all the more unbearable. Today I live as a slave to another man’s madness. I see its fearful workings before my eyes, I am a lucid witness to its utter inhumanity, and nothing prevents me from walking away, but I stay. Because by now, for me, any other life would be still greater madness. So each day I wake up, bow my head wearily and carry on, working through a heartless destiny which has chosen me, of all men, for its experiment. Each day I nurture the wild beast to which I am chained; my mind is like a stone, my thoughts like clefts within it, my body a sloughed skin, staked out with wooden pickets and laid out to dry.

  That year, the tulips came up diseased. They wilted on the grass, rotten and black with gnats. I’d planted them one misty November afternoon, with all the morbid enthusiasm of an artificer laying his mines, and throughout the winter I awaited their explosions. They rotted without ever opening, trickles of rust stippling their stems. That should already have struck me as an omen. All the neighbouring gardens looked stricken, as though blighted by some invisible disease. Foul air wafted from the houses like the breath of some troubled sleeper; green-streaked light fell from a leaden sky. That strange dampness hanging over things – poisoning plants, driving birds from their nests – betokened death. I would see the birds of an evening, flu
ttering in alarm, perched on the highest branches of the lime tree; the next morning I would find broken eggs and little corpses covered in excrement. Everything seemed to be turning to stone; I began to feel that the only thing that was made of flesh and blood in that whole sorry set-up was me. But slowly I too was becoming petrified, assuming a mineral heaviness.

  At least Irene was still with me then. I had her presence to channel the flow of my days, the rhythm of her breathing to hold my nights together. The fine tuning between us, in our household intimacy, was so perfect that we had no need for speech. We could communicate by means of sound. When I heard the taps in the upstairs bathroom running, I knew that Irene was going to have a bath, and the time on the clock and the day of the week on the calendar told me the rest: whether it was the cinema or the restaurant that she wanted to go to. In winter, the prolonged creaking of the parquet in the living room of a Sunday morning was a summons: Irene was sitting on the sofa, waiting for me. We would be going out for an aperitif, or to buy flowers. When I came home late from the office, if I heard the sound of drawers being continuously opened and closed, I knew that she was in a bad mood, or irritated with me because I was late. Then I would put on the television and turn up the volume of the signature tune of our favourite programme to lure her down. On weekend afternoons, if she failed to hear me moving around in my study, it was she who would come up to look for me, throwing open the window and saying: ‘It’s stuffy in here!’ She would take me by the hand and lead me into the living room, then sit down at the piano and begin to play.

  I’d lived a quiet, somewhat circumspect life with Irene for many years. We’d met each other too late in life for our by now hardened sense of solitude to melt away in the warmth of mutual affection. We each nursed our independence as though it were an ageing parent whom we treated abruptly, distantly, secretly chiding it for its dogged capacity for survival. Yet, side by side, we kept each other company in the old house where we had gone to live together. We had rented it almost by way of a joke, a challenge: it was too big for us, too expensive to maintain, and there was too much garden. But those large spaces, those light-filled rooms, served to remind us both of the cramped lodgings of our earlier existences. With time, we’d fashioned those walls to our own shapes. The floors bore the imprint of our passing, the wood was worn from contact with our hands. The light switches and window frames responded to our touch; despite the imperfections that had accumulated over the years, they remained docile and obedient when it was we who pressed upon or raised them. We had become commingled with the essence of that house, with the materials of which it was constructed; its stonework, its panelling, its dust were impregnated with our being, to the point of giving out our very smell. We in return bore it upon our clothes; it came gusting towards us when we opened the door, back from some holiday. I would sometimes come upon it, when I was travelling for my work, lurking in some handkerchief, or in a book, or in a tie left too long in a cupboard. Over time, Irene had filled the rooms with antique furniture; she had great flair, and would frequently unearth rare or striking pieces. She would spend hours in antique shops she’d come across in some out-of-the-way village across the border, and when she had found something that particularly caught her fancy, she was like a dog with a bone: she’d stroke it and sniff at it, examine handles and hinges, test out the locks, listen to the creaking of the joints, open and close drawers and doors, drumming on the wood with her knuckles. But she would make a purchase only after meticulous deliberation. She would subject the puzzled vendor to lengthy questioning, until she had extracted all that he knew about the history of the item in question; then, when it seemed that the deal was about to be done, she would thank him and be off, saying that she also wanted to give the piece in question time to think. Running the risk of finding it gone, she would return to the shop several days later, at a different time: to take the item by surprise, she would say, because only in its lonely abandonment, stripped of all expectations, would the old wood loosen its fibres and reveal its soul. Her relationship with the furniture that she brought home varied from piece to piece: each one had its own character, and Irene knew how to bring it out. She would introduce them to me like silent relatives who were coming to stay. I always found them faintly disquieting; it seemed to me that they did indeed hold something living prisoner within their boards, and often it would occur to me that perhaps I too had become one of them, an old chest of drawers forgotten in some junk shop, and that Irene had chosen me in the same way, touching me, sniffing me, running her hands over my old frame and finding it to be that of a seasoned loner. Yet for me, the presence of their austere forms in that house were so many pointers to Irene’s own presence, which was as solid, antique and immutable as their carved wood. Irene and I had lived together for so long that by now she felt like one of my own internal organs. Somewhere within me, there she was, pulsating along with the rest, and our everyday life slid past, as untroubled as a landscape viewed from a train, becoming gradually cluttered up with holiday photos, clothes inevitably soon out of fashion, phases that gently coalesced, memories that could be either hers or mine. But all this was doomed inexorably to end. An invisible worm was silently devouring us from within: beneath the lustrous shell of our apparent happiness, of that precious, ever stronger bond we believed time to have forged between us, all that was left was dust.

  One evening during that dismal spring, catching me looking sadly out of the window at my blighted tulips, Irene had come up to me and put her arms around my waist. ‘Your roses will make up for them!’ she whispered in my ear. I smiled at those words of consolation, but instead of joy, what I felt within me was the cold breath of an unknown fear. A touch of lassitude had crept into her voice, a resigned wariness. At that same moment a brief, light shower of rain spattered the gardens, and an unexpected shaft of sunlight turned the thousand drops upon the window panes an orange-yellow. For some time – as the blue night fell upon the rain-soaked city and entered our friendly house, swelling the shadows and blurring our faces – I held her in my arms.

  Over those days – now splintered into a thousand fragments – I was beginning my new job as head of the interpreters’ department. It was a world I hardly knew, quite different from that of the administrative duties I’d previously carried out. Geographically, the offices of the conference section of the international body for which I was now working were in something of a backwater, housed in a green suburbia of neat modern roads, in a spacious park, so that my little white building at the end of an avenue of maples looked like a clinic, a sanatorium housing the sufferers from some rare but not dangerous disease. And, truth to tell, working among interpreters, I did indeed feel that I was dealing with ‘sufferers’, beset by some mysterious unease. Their troubles usually took the form of a garrulous euphoria, but also sometimes that of a scabby touchiness, like an internal itch that could never be assuaged. Without knowing any of them personally, I had learned to distinguish them from among the anonymous crowd of functionaries. In the canteen, in the bar, in the local restaurants, in the entrance halls of our various offices, they formed small groups of wildly gesticulating, wild-eyed individuals, endlessly prattling, leaping from one language to another like acrobats, sometimes prone to fitful movements, reminiscent of those made for no apparent reason by a fish or bird. They did not seem to engage in conversations, I didn’t feel that they listened to one another. Their talk had an overenthusiastic quality about it, like that of witch doctors who are using the word to keep themselves in a state of trance. I came to see that they had a horror of silence; they seemed to stiffen in alarm whenever they sensed that it was about to descend upon them. They fended it off with an animal instinct, clustering in noisy packs. Even when meetings went on until late at night, and in the breaks when I would come upon them at the counter in the bar, bleary-eyed and drowsy, there was always one who would carry on gabbling, keeping the fire of the word alive so as to ferry his companions out of that cold and silent hour. The others would liste
n to him trustingly, abandoning themselves to his voice as though to a life-saving raft.

  In my heart of hearts, I’ve always had trouble with polyglots. Above all, because those who vaunt a knowledge of many languages have always struck me as show-offs. No human being can really be capable of speaking the tongues of so many others equally well; anyone venturing to do so is embarking on an unhealthy exercise which can only lead to mental instability. The only foreign language known to me is an inadequate and obsolete German, acquired willy-nilly at grammar school. My father’s mother tongue has never put down roots in me; if I can still drag up some stilted phrases, this is not because I practise it or take care to keep myself updated in this tongue that I find so antipathetic, but simply because – behind the hazy memory of rules learned off by heart, like answers at a catechism class – I can still hear my father reproving me in his own exasperated German. I hear my teacher imperiously summoning me to the blackboard for questioning, browbeating me, ordering me to speak German, as a soldier might be ordered out of a trench to go on the attack. It matters little that the threat has passed; the fear remains; only such fear could induce a man to leave his own mind unguarded to pursue words that are not his. Languages are like toothbrushes: the only one you should put into your mouth is your own. It’s a question of hygiene, of good manners; it’s dangerous to let yourself be contaminated by the germs of another tongue. What do we know about what might be unleashed when they slip into the delicate vessels of our brain, when they mingle with our most ancient juices and generate some hybrid that God never intended? The germs of European diseases did for the American Indians. Similarly, a foreign language injected into our mind brings with it the taint of unknown sounds, a vision of worlds that are incomprehensible to us – the lure of other truths and a devilish desire to know them.