The Interpreter Read online

  ‘You’re the only one in that place who’s doing two jobs for the price of one! They should give you two pensions, or at least publish two obituaries when you drop dead at your desk of a heart attack!’ she would say to me with a bitter laugh when I picked up my bulging briefcase to go to work of a Saturday morning.

  But the situation showed no signs of easing up, and I also found myself obliged to take on other duties, attending long and frequent official events at other international institutions in Europe and North America. Irene began to accuse me of deserting her.

  One Sunday afternoon, when I had had to go into the office yet again – to trawl through the archives for files relating to some accounts queries – all of a sudden the sky was swept free of clouds, and a burst of sunlight filtered determinedly through the slats of the dusty blinds; and that light told me something, it stirred some memory which warmed my heart. I slapped shut the folders I was looking through, gathered up my things and rushed home. I wanted to take Irene to the lake; we would catch the ferry and go to get a bit of sun on the terrace of an old café where we were regulars. On the way, I broke out into a run, but started sweating and stopped to take off my coat. I dashed into the house, puffing and panting, and called out as I always did, looking up at the white banisters on the stairway. But my voice died away in the emptiness. I went into the living room, threw my briefcase and overcoat down on the sofa and went up to the first floor. I called out again, thinking that perhaps Irene was hiding, playing a joke on me, as she used to when we were first married. Laughing, I opened the cupboard doors, drew back the curtains around the bed, looked behind doors, certain I’d find her hiding place. But Irene wasn’t there. I went back slowly down the stairs and sat on the sofa, somewhat concerned by now. In the garden, shaken by a slight breeze, my roses were coming into bud, the dew on them sparkling in the sun. In my mind’s eye, I saw the first sails swelling on the lake, the green lawns at its edges teeming with people, the ferry cleaving the foaming water as it approached the jetty where our café awaited us with its peeling paintwork; the only clients at that time of day would be anxious little old ladies wearing white shoes. I looked towards the corridor, straining my ears; I thought I’d heard a noise, but it was just the creaking of old wood. I remember that I dozed off, huddled in my overcoat and, strangely, I remember smiling in my sleep. Irene came into the room, causing the door to squeak, but seeing me asleep she crept away again; I caught a glimpse of her with her raincoat and her umbrella still in her hand. Then all that remained of her was a gust of cold air and the smell of her scent. It was already late; the sun had gone down behind the trees. In the garden, my roses were now still, their heads as stiff and fragile as glass baubles. I could feel the blood beating in my temples and a bluish mist swam before my eyes; I felt cold, numbed by that unnatural sleep. Suddenly I had the irritating feeling of having wasted time; then I felt a cold sadness creeping over me like a snake, slithering over Irene’s furniture, slinking under the door and engulfing our whole house in its deathly grip.

  A few days later, I found him sitting waiting for me in the brown armchair outside my office. The moment he stood up to greet me I could instantly smell the bitter scent of freshly planed wood which, from then onwards, would always forewarn me of one of his tempestuous visits, or of his hidden presence in various entrance halls, corridors or conference halls, as though he had just passed by, leaving a poisonous odour in his wake. I sat down at my desk and looked closely at that ever labile face which, when I have looked at it for a few moments, even today continues to dissolve before my very eyes, never to be retrieved. It is not a face, it is a mask: tomorrow, today’s wrinkles will have changed their course like wadis in a desert; tomorrow, today’s pale eyes will have become black empty holes; tomorrow, today’s generous mouth will have become a bloodless gash in the cold flesh of a corpse, and tomorrow the silky darkness of his hair will be like stubble, or indeed his skull may now resemble a round bone, monstrously swollen above a neck seamed with black veins.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ I would have liked to use his name, but I’d already forgotten it. I hid my embarrassment by fiddling around with the pile of signed and stamped papers from the file which the ever-eager secretary had laid out on my desk.

  ‘It’s about the report,’ he said, after a fit of coughing.

  ‘Ah, the report…’ I pretended not to know what he was talking about and shot him an expectant look.

  ‘Stauber’s report – Stauber is my superior,’ he explained.

  ‘Tell me more,’ I said encouragingly. At first he hesitated, twisting his hands and seeking the first words of a speech he must already have given several times.

  ‘It’s nothing but a tissue of brazen lies. It isn’t true that I translate badly, or that I utter meaningless words. It isn’t true that I’m silent for minutes on end, or that I rave into the microphone – you can come and listen to me if you like. And above all, I’m not ill – so don’t dredge up that schizophrenia story again! The psychiatrist can say whatever he likes: I’m the only person inside my head, and only I know what goes on there! As to those sounds, I’ve explained about them time and again. How can it be that no one will listen to me? They’re not senseless noises, they’re a language! A secret language! I can hear it swirling through my mind, flowing through my head, cutting across all the rest like a hidden thread! And I repeat those sounds, when they well up, in order to capture that language, to fix it in my mind. I don’t know how I became aware of them – probably unconsciously, like so many invisible seeds hidden within the many languages I’ve studied. Coming together in my brain, they’ve taken root and sprouted, and now a mysterious language is growing within me without my realising. A process as old as man is taking place in my head: the birth of a new language! Or perhaps the rebirth of an old one, forgotten by mankind!’

  His voice had been calm at first, but now it was beginning to sound agitated; the words were pouring from him, angry and forceful. He was seated on the edge of his chair, his forearms on the desk, his hands stretched towards my own as though he wanted to seize them.

  ‘Let’s make a pact then, shall we, the two of us?’ He made a questioning gesture which demanded a reply. I gave a quick nod. The interpreter took a deep breath and went on:

  ‘Give me time. Just give me time, and I’ll find out what’s happening, you’ll see. Above all, let me carry on interpreting! It’s in the electrolysis of simultaneous interpreting that it all takes place – when words of one language detach themselves like electrons and go swarming off to stick themselves on to another! It’s when I hear them vibrating together, all fifteen of them, when their sounds open up like pores, like mucous membranes seeking each other out and recognising each other – it’s then, in that fleeting moment of translation, that I hear it surfacing, still faint and distant, it’s true, but entire and whole! And when I’ve tracked it down, when I’ve understood it more thoroughly and gained a certain mastery of it, then I’ll find a way of writing it down. I’ll construct its grammar and compile a dictionary; and I’ll donate the fruits of my labours to your institute, which will then be able proudly to tell mankind that it is the depository of the language of the universe, the one concealed in the eternal polar ice, the one lurking in the chasms of the oceans, the one which has commanded matter since the dawn of time!’

  As he spoke, the veins in his neck were contracting and snapping in his throat like whips. Thinking back to that first encounter, to that first time I witnessed the contortions of that face, all that I remember are two blue veins and the bruised aperture of a mouth.

  I lowered my eyes, desperately seeking for something to say. It was clear that the man before me was deranged. I had to find the words to placate him, to distance him from me, and I had to do so as delicately as possible. I pretended to be absorbed in a page in his file while I considered my position. I took a deep breath, bent my head, prepared a smile and raised my face to him, somewhat uncertainly.

  ‘Don’t you worry
. I’ll have a word with Stauber and everything will be sorted out!’ I interrupted whatever it was he seemed to want to say by getting up and showing him to the door.

  ‘There’s no cause for alarm. Civilised people can always come to an understanding, can they not?’ I added for further reassurance, while steering him politely but firmly out of the office. He put up no resistance, thinking perhaps that as yet I knew nothing of his case.

  ‘You will tell Stauber that I’m not mad, won’t you?’ he repeated as he stamped off down the corridor, his footsteps ringing on the lino. I closed the door, exchanging relieved glances with my secretary. I went back to my desk and sat there motionless for quite some time, staring at the empty chair in front of me and listening to the rain pattering against the window panes.

  That afternoon I had a bit of free time, so I had myself driven to the conference centre, a luxurious modern building with large windows overlooking the lake, all pink-veined marble and expensive carpeting. I went up to the piano nobile and into a conference hall. The languages being translated were listed on a board; I glanced from the balcony at the seats in the amphitheatre, where the delegates were seated behind the plaques with the names of their countries, their hands on their earphones. A metallic chatter, muffled by the large windows, vibrated senselessly through the air, dying away into the wood panelling on the walls. The door leading to the interpreters’ booths was open. I went up four lavishly carpeted steps and turned into the narrow corridor which ran around the hall, with the interpreters’ booths opening off it. In each one I saw the shadows of two interpreters, one bent over the microphone, the other listening attentively. And now those glass niches, set into the wall, suddenly struck me as resembling the cells in a laboratory used for storing the valves of primitive organisms, each consisting of just one mouth and one ear, sheathed by vague liquid filaments. I found an open door and an empty booth next to the one used by the French interpreters, slipped into it and peered through the blue-tinted glass. Below me, an usher was walking among the seats, distributing leaflets. The delegates were leafing through their papers and exchanging nods; from time to time one would raise his hand to ask to speak. I took the headphones off the hook, held them up to one ear and turned the knob to hear the various speakers. Voices and languages alternated like so many radio stations from distant countries. The speaker was reading out his piece with his eyes on his audience, and the interpreters would follow him through the microphones. Intrigued, I sat down on the chair and put both earphones on; I tried the French channel first, leaning forwards to observe the interpreter in the next booth whose voice I was hearing: he too was leaning forwards slightly as he spoke, clenching and unclenching his fists as he did so, but his facial expressions did not follow the intonation of his speech, as if the voice that was speaking did not inhabit that body but was simply passing through it, using its vocal cords, its lips, its palate in order to become sound. I looked at his eyes and saw in them a kind of blindness, a fixed, blank, inhuman look, as though he were seeing the unspeakable and could not look away. That cold world I had just glimpsed filled me with fear. I pushed back my chair, turned the knob and listened for a moment to the German. Then I happened upon some unknown language, the merest burble of sound that echoed in my ears, singsong and sugary, possibly oriental. The next one I came upon was harsher, syncopated and unyielding. I turned the knob again, and heard a female voice pronouncing gummy vowels, which seemed to get stuck on her palate, those of a flabby, boneless language, as though set in transparent gristle. My mind on the interpreter’s weird ideas, I was foolishly trying to understand languages I had no knowledge of, breaking down words and syllables, intrigued by the thought that it might be possible to find some feature shared by that swarm of jumbled voices. Could there really be any link between them? I fantasised that I might be the person to track it down. I, who knew nothing of languages and hated anything I couldn’t understand. I abandoned myself to such fantasies and, lulled by the warm female voice I had in my ear, my thoughts wandered back to the pictures of primitive men in my old school books, Egyptian hieroglyphs under a drawing of the pyramids. A vivid image of my German teacher, set between screeching monkeys and brightly coloured parrots, his lapels spattered with chalk from the declension-strewn blackboard, now swam into my mind; he was pointing his finger at me, pronouncing my name with his annoying accent. I hung the earphones back on the hook and left the booth with a distinct sense of unease. I shook my head, slightly ashamed at having entertained those absurd thoughts even for a moment, at believing that there might be a grain of truth in the interpreter’s abstruse theories. No, that man was sick, and had to go – for his own good and for the good name of our institution.

  The days that followed were radiant with sunshine; the sky was filled with light until late evening. I would go home on foot, enjoying the warm air, still ringing with birdsong; I would listen to the wind rustling in the new leaves of the trees in the park, the hooting of a distant ferry on the lake. As I walked, through open windows I could see laid supper tables, lit rooms and televisions. In front of my own house I would pause for a moment before going in; pushing open the door, I would invariably dream of finding everything as it once was: the light on in the kitchen, a bunch of fresh flowers in a vase in the hall of a Tuesday, the smell of floor polish of a Friday, the tapping of Irene’s heels as she came to meet me, a favourite record playing in the living room. Each time in fact, I found a different sort of change, and I had to decipher ever unknown signs to work out the circumstances in which I would find my companion: she would emerge from a shadowy sofa or a room where she had been waiting for me, gazing from a window, lost in thought; she would join me in the kitchen, often barefoot; she would rest her elbows wearily on the table and watch me eating, peering out at me from under her fringe. Sometimes I would catch her still asleep, completely dressed, one leg hanging over the edge of the bed, her handbag still on her arm. On weekends she got up late and would eat no more than a bite of the croissant I had bought her from her favourite bakery at the end of the road; she would leaf through the papers for the entertainment pages, underlining the times that films would be showing at strange cinemas, which was her way of letting me know where she would be going that afternoon. Sometimes I had tried accompanying her, picking up my coat and following her; in the car she would talk of trivia, of how the maid had dyed the sheets pink, about how a curtain in the living room had come unstitched and what a bore it was going to be to have it mended. But all of our conversations had the inconsequential quality of those you have on the platform just before one of you gets onto a train. On coming out of the cinema, in the blue light of the afternoon streets, my heart would be weighed down with a sadness heavy as lead. And so, with time, I ended up staying at home alone. I would spend my time in the garden, obsessively tending my roses, as though that were the only way that I could hope to salvage my bond with Irene. At the first sign of an insect on the swelling buds I would rush to spray on insecticide, to spread manure and other nutrients; I would cut off any twig that was out of place, fix climbers to their supports, dig up the slightest weed, pull off dead leaves and pointlessly remove the faded petals. Irene was receding further from me every day, and I could do nothing but be witness to such estrangement. I measured it from time to time, registering the length of her silences, the frequency of her absences, the harshness of her ways; secretly, I hoodwinked myself into believing that the careful registering and measuring of this unknown hurt would ultimately reveal its nature and provide me with some antidote.

  There was a mist hanging over the lake on the day she went away for good; it rose slowly from the water like a poisonous breath, and spread over the city, still bathed in the warm twilight. I had just returned from a week of travelling for work, I was dead tired and I knew I had the airport’s smell of sweat and crowds upon me, but I had no desire to go home. Going up the stairs, I found the living room empty; Irene’s furniture had disappeared; all that remained of the sideboard, the empire-style d
ivan, the Louis Philippe table, were darker patches on the parquet. My own things were scattered all around the room on the floor in the places where the furniture containing them had stood; they now struck me as a brutal résumé of my life with Irene, a scant anthology of what remained of so many years together: a guide book, a crystal vase that had been a birthday present, the television, the hatstand, the transistor radio, a few art books, silver frames emptied of their photographs, an old pack of cards, an ashtray and my collection of jazz records. Irene was in the living room, standing in front of the window, smoking a cigarette, with her coat on. Even my footsteps sounded desolate as I entered the empty room. In the half-light, I couldn’t make out her expression. I put on the lights.

  ‘I’ve put your scientific encyclopaedia in your study,’ was all she said, shielding her eyes from the light, and then she very slowly walked away.

  Out of sheer weariness, or perhaps I mean cowardice, I ended up by signing the request for the interpreter’s dismissal; I felt that my superiors wanted the whole thing out of the way. One May morning I found the same old yellowing file on my desk again; handed around from department to department, it had been growing fatter by the week, filling up with all manner of additional documentation and passed from pillar to post. The moment came when all was safely gathered in; now it was up to me to press the button which would clinch matters once and for all; all I had to do was sign my name beneath so many others on the last dog-eared page. I took the top off my fountain pen and gazed pointlessly at the nib; it had been given to me by Irene when I’d been made head of department, and it was when I signed my name in watery blue ink that I thought I had snapped the link between our destinies, his and my own, catapulted two lives out of their orbits, into the dark and empty cosmos which is the dwelling place of things that never happened, of those mistaken paths which God, seeking to escape from his own abominable creation, bethought himself to take and then forswore.