The Interpreter Read online

  From that day onwards, I had no peace. That man was pursuing me: he went out of his way to bump into me, to catch my attention, even for a moment, and harangue me with his pleas; he would plonk himself down in my secretary’s office and refuse to budge until I’d heard him out, but then of course I’d have to tell him the same old things: that my decision was forced upon me, that everything militated against him. The psychiatrist’s report, and his own behaviour in office, as recorded by Stauber, left no way out. I encouraged him to resign himself, pointed out that he would be well provided for and that now at last he had all the time in the world for his research. But he wouldn’t listen to reason and repeated his entreaty as he always did.

  ‘Quash the decision! You’re the only one in a position to do so! It’s no skin off your nose!’

  After a while, I stopped paying him any attention. When the secretary announced his arrival, I’d leave the office by the other door, but he wouldn’t give up. He carried on hounding me, and wherever I was in the building, I knew that sooner or later I’d see him looming in front of me. It had become an obsession. He’d wait for me as I came out of meetings, follow me down corridors and start calling out my name, elbowing people out of his way to catch up with me. I’d even given up my quiet lunches in the canteen in order to avoid him; I’d get on a tram and go and eat in a bistro frequented by boatmen. He’d send me illegible letters which I usually threw straight into the bin; he’d slip messages under my door. I would even find him waiting for me early in the morning at the closed door of my office or outside the lifts. He would pursue me like a beggar, he’d clutch me by the arm, reiterating his wearisome complaints.

  ‘You’ve given me a death sentence! This way I’ll really go mad! Don’t you see that they’re fooling you? That it’s nothing but lies?’

  Sometimes he would even pretend to be someone else in order to make contact with me; he would telephone my secretary and disguise his voice, hoping not to be recognised. On some mornings I’d find a date pencilled into my diary, some appointment with a representative of the international association of conference interpreters, or with a journalist from some well-known newspaper, and who would I find in front of me but that man, pig-headed and recalcitrant as ever, disguised by a false name. On each occasion, something imperceptibly different about him – a wrinkle, the set of his mouth – prevented me from recognising him straight away; confused and embarrassed, I would hesitate; consumed by doubt, I would stare at the figure approaching my desk, taking stock of its clothes, its shoes, its bearing, trying to discern some sign that would give a clue as to its identity. Was this really the person who figured in my diary? Or was it the interpreter in one of his many disguises? Fearing to offend some innocent in his place, I would lose precious time. Only when we were practically nose to nose would I recognise him: it was that smell that gave him away, that sudden waft of glue and bitter sap. But it was too late now: there he was, sitting in front of me, fiddling with the papers on my desk as though to thrust his way in among the thoughts that were currently on my mind. And there we’d go again, with him imploring me to reinstate him.

  ‘I need to do simultaneous translation! I need to hear all the languages together! This is the only place where I can do that. Do you see what I’m saying? You’re a good man – let me at least sit in during a conference, I promise not to talk, with the microphone off no one will notice me. Just let me search for the secret language – this is the only place it can be heard! These words are not the rantings of a madman! Just give me a month or two, another two hundred hours of simultaneous translation with five booths, and I’ll give you proof I’m not talking nonsense. That’s where it is – the language mankind has forgotten! Just forget rules and regulations for a moment. Use your head, for God’s sake – you’re still capable of it. Remember that a functionary in an international institution is working for the good of all mankind, and not for some bureaucracy!’

  I was beginning to get worried: that man might become dangerous. I even thought of going to the police. Nor could I understand why, of all the people who had signed the request for his dismissal, I was the only one he was so doggedly pursuing: perhaps because I had been the last to sign? Or because I was the only one who would agree to see him?

  One evening I came across him in the road, at the gate to the park I walked through on my way home. It was raining heavily; the lights of the cars turning off along the lake were catching the tops of the trees, which were tossing in the wind. I was hesitating as to whether to carry on by foot, and was about to go down the avenue to the tram stop when I heard hurried footsteps between the hedges of the gravel path. Thinking it might be some ne’er-do-well, I went towards the gate and turned round defensively, my umbrella at the ready in the dark. And there he was again, pale, shaking, hollow-eyed, mouth agape. He gestured to me, then set off in the direction of the lake. Some obscure force caused me to follow him, and I walked along beside him in the darkness, punctuated occasionally by a flash of yellow headlight. I peered at him out of the corner of my eye, trying to remember what I could of that ever-changing face. Then, looking around the park with its bluish shadows, I felt a sudden pang of fear. That man was mad, he might attack me, even kill me; yet I walked on by his side. There was some unresolved business between us which I simply had to conclude once and for all, and I felt that now was the time. When we came to the lake he stopped and turned towards me. I took a few steps back from the black water – the rain was still hammering down – and took up a position a few steps away from him. He stayed where he was for a few moments, head bowed, then took his hands out of his pockets and lifted his chin. He made an elaborate and completely senseless movement in the air, and it occurred to me that even his gestures were fatuous, deformed by the power of a will which had gone awry. He spoke in the hoarse, rasping voice of a man who has been shouting for too long.

  ‘Not many people understand what I am searching for. Mankind is troubled by the very idea that the earth might have a secret language, and that this language lies hidden within each of our ruptured words, unsettled by the thought that it lives in objects, in animals, within these trees, even in stones, and that the planets speak to each other using it. Mankind refuses to believe it can understand the ancient language of Eden, the one in which the serpent spoke to Adam!’

  A gust of wind carried his voice away amidst the rustling of the leaves and the pounding rain. I could no longer hear his words, so I took a few cautious steps towards him as he stood on the gravel of the bank, legs apart, shouting and gesticulating wildly. It was then that I realised that he was no longer talking in French, or not in French alone. Other sounds with which I was unfamiliar were creeping into his speech. I moved a little nearer: now I could understand again, or at least grasp some phrases.

  ‘You won’t be seeing me again, I promise you. I’ll keep out of your way – forever. But I’d like you to know that your imperviousness to my pleading means that you carry a burden of guilt. By being so obtuse, you are doing violence to your own intelligence. You are refusing to understand: you could see through this darkness, yet you choose to remain blind. Yet you’re complicit in my discovery whether you like it or not, and what you refuse to know will dog you always! All your life you will continue to wonder what I was looking for, and whether I found it. Like me, you know the secret mankind is not yet ready to receive and, like me, you will not be spared. This is the poisonous knowledge I bequeath you! So here they are, the sounds that will torment you from this day forward! Listen! You will hear them in your sleep, they will taint your words, they will pursue you in your loneliness each time the hollow human voices around you become stilled, because these sounds…’

  His speech was borne off on another gust of wind. But when the branches stopped creaking and the leaves fell silent in a temporary lull, it was then, with my own eyes and my own ears – I swear to God – that I witnessed the ghastly scene of that man’s metamorphosis, one in which all the awful power of creation was at work. His ey
es were raised towards the dismal sky, his mouth agape; drawing his stomach in, he began to hiss, emitting a sound like a liquid whistle, which his palate was trying to restrain but which then sank down into his throat and mingled with a raucous vibration of his vocal cords. Between a series of fitful spasms which caused him to seize up, as though in a fit of retching, the mysterious sound gurgled out from behind his glottis to become a muffled whimper, then rose again like overflowing liquid, then exploded into the hollow of his mouth in meaningless, truncated words, apparently uttered by someone else. A prey to uncontrollable grimaces, he nonetheless seemed to embrace the trauma with which he was bedevilled, as though almost welcoming those violent gulps and hiccups into his racked frame. He was grinding his teeth, his eyes were almost out of their sockets, his lips were stretched into a fearful gape which at times resembled a smile. Animal cries, strident braying, harsh-sounding meaningless words which could belong to no human tongue poured forth, apparently at random. His face too had become transformed, taking on the appearance of a bird, his nose now resembling a beak, his eyes like sightless bubbles of glass; he was waving his arms around in the air like the talons of a bird of prey, and by so doing he seemed to have stirred up the very elements, which now started to whirl around again as though in sympathy. Behind his back, the water was heaving and roiling, as though the sounds he was uttering were striking deep into its dark depths, awakening chill lake monsters from their age-old sleep as they heard his voice from where they lurked in the slime, and rose clumsily to the surface to see who on earth could be calling them.

  Aghast at the sight of that fearful vision, I took a step backwards, stumbled through the trees, emerged onto the muddy grass and carried on running until I reached the lighted road.

  II

  The summer went by like a fit of fever; the offices emptied out, the corridors now peopled only by the odd dead-eyed caretaker. The endless papers which, until a few days ago, had been whirling around on my desk, suddenly calmed down and became silent. The lake was alive with sailing boats, leaving foaming ripples in their wake. A persistent festive buzz came from its glittering shore, though without ever reaching the city, which lay silent and crushed beneath the sun’s resolute glare. I sought shelter from all this intrusive brightness by burrowing into my solitude, surprised to discover how deep I could dig; I came upon caves of fear and silence where time oozed forth in slow and heavy drops. I cowered there, anxious to emerge yet drawn to their chill depths. By day I wandered through the half-empty city with the excuse of making pointless purchases; I would buy bread which would then harden, forgotten on my desk, fruit which would moulder and rot in the plastic bag. Although I didn’t admit as much, it was Irene whom I was hoping to meet. I would follow every woman who looked remotely like her, catch up with her, already knowing that she was not the person I wanted her to be, walk past her and wander off disconsolate, talking to myself like a mad man.

  It was the park that I preferred for my solitary ramblings; I would walk, head bowed, along the lakeside, until the call of a seagull or a hooting ferry roused me from my aimless drifting. I’d sit down wearily on a bench, pondering the route of my bleak return. Each hour of the day, each district, recalled a thousand memories, which flew off like flocks of birds at my approach, leaving foul feathers scattered on the grass, all that remained of what had once been such rich swag. Everything fled from me, but everything also pursued me, doggedly. In the deepest shade of the park I sometimes thought I heard the interpreter’s squawking and braying and, to my alarm, would find that I had ended up at that very place on the lake shore where I had seen him last. I would hurry off, trying to resist the temptation to turn round, and when at last I yielded, all that I saw was the sun’s fitful dazzle on the flower-filled shore and the brightly coloured ice-cream van slithering along the gravelled alleyway with its mournful peal of bells. A breath of fear would ripple through the wet grass, the feeling that something fateful had happened just at that very moment and that I was the only man in the world who was unaware of it. I would be seized by the certainty that something awesome had occurred, but I did not know what; all I felt was the need to remember, to note the light, the colour of the sky, the time, the landscape. So that at least would remain for me.

  At night I would lock myself up in the big empty house. The only room I now used was my study; I’d put a camp bed in it, and would lie there for hours, staring up at the sky until the light drained away and darkness reigned at last. I would doze off, briefly, only to be hounded by the start of a nightmare in which Irene’s reproaches would mingle with obscure threats from the interpreter, dragging me from the lukewarm waters of sleep. Since the interpreter had no clearly defined face, it was she who would begin to bark at me, cawing, hissing, staring at me with the eyes of a wild beast, uttering senseless words, like those of a sorceress. I would lie there for hours, drowsing uneasily like a creature beached on scorching sand, racked by fits of exhausted, dry-eyed weeping; only at dawn did I manage to fall asleep for a few hours, to wake up cold and aching, my head still full of the gibberish that had peopled my nightmares, which I repeated to myself mechanically – against my will, it seemed to have become lodged in my tangled memory, to have cemented itself into my mind. On my walks through the park, I would find myself uttering these senseless words out loud, in time to the rhythm of my steps, of my breath, of the music of popular songs played on the radio; they bored themselves insistently into my brain, prolonging night-time anguish into the daylight hours. I even tried putting them side by side, to see if, aligned with one another, they would take on any sense. I broke them down, turned them around, read them backwards, covered whole sheets of paper with them. I went to look them up in foreign dictionaries I’d found in the translation department library.

  Sometimes, on my way home, it seemed to me that Irene had been back, that she’d come to look for me while I was out. I went through every room in the house, following imaginary traces of her passing, but all that I found was the dull whiteness of dust on the parquet, the stale scent of my lost peace of mind lingering in some corner. In her pursuit, I combed the city from side to side; I called all the numbers in the little notebook she’d left beside the phone, only to be answered by hairdressers closed for the holidays, cabinet-makers, junk shops, the tinny tones of answerphones in empty flats. I even phoned some relatives of hers in Zurich; her cousin told me she’d gone back to Canada, but no, he didn’t have her address; his hesitant tone made me suspect that he was seeking advice from someone else in the room, and I had the sudden feeling that Irene was there, right next to him, prompting him as to what to say. I was assured that he would give her my message, that he would let me know her address in Canada, but while I was dictating my own address into the receiver I had the distinct feeling that it was not being taken down; her cousin seemed very eager to hang up, saying goodbye evasively and with false courtesy. I called the number again many times over the following days, at various times of the day and night; it was answered just once, after many rings, late that same August, by an irritated-sounding maid, who told me in German that there was no one home, they’d all gone to the seaside.

  Whole days would go by without my saying a word to a soul; I was surprised to learn how long one could live without speaking. I’d say ‘Good morning’ to the caretaker in the office, the odd ‘sorry’ to someone on the tram, a ‘thank you’ in the bar, and it would already be evening. The trees were turning with the first heavy rain, the nights were becoming dark again; less dramatic dawns would reveal a steely sky which sent a fine white dust raining down onto the city, and the lake was puckered with cold wrinkles, which broke up on the shore like the laboured breath of a sick man. Voices rang out again in office corridors and the streets were bright with headlamps of an evening. I started work again, and within the shelter of my room the grip of solitude eased up a little; in there, time could flow over me without harming me. But as soon as I was out again on the street, I felt myself short of breath, each corner like a
dagger of anguish planted in my back. I’d try to spin out my journey, to put off the moment when I’d have to turn the key in the lock and be enveloped by the darkness of those empty rooms. I’d wander from one pavement to another, sometimes suddenly changing direction to escape my goal, and I had the feeling that the people around me noticed my odd behaviour and looked at me suspiciously, as though I were a beggar.

  It happened for the first time on a Saturday afternoon, and in the moments that followed I truly felt that each man and his destiny are two sworn enemies whom only death will part; only one of the two can go on living, the other must succumb. The fight is not only desperate, it is also unequal; it may go on for years, or draw to a lightning close. Yet there are men who manage to floor their mortal double and clear the way for their own existence. I am not one of them: I died that day, and the person who is writing this is a mere ghost. I’d gone into a baker’s to buy my usual loaf of bread, but instead of the words I had intended to produce, what came out of my mouth was incomprehensible blather. At first I thought I was just out of practice, that my long periods of silence had weakened my powers of conversation; in the office I’d already noticed my voice becoming hoarse after just a few moments dictating to my secretary. So I simply gave the puzzled shopgirl an embarrassed look and tried repeating my request. In my efforts to speak clearly, I felt my throat knotting up; between the words I was so clumsily pronouncing, I gave out a long rasping sound like that of a whimpering dog. Eyes wide with terror, I backed off towards the door and left the shop, making brusque gestures of refusal to the alarm-stricken shopgirl, who was still firmly proffering me my loaf of bread. I ran off like a murderer, my throat paralysed by fear, turning around every so often to look back at the by now distant baker’s to check that no one was coming after me, that people were not stopping to point at me as I passed. When I got home, I rushed up, panting, to the bathroom mirror: what I saw reflected before me was not my usual gaunt face, but one with the glassy eyes of a fish, a foam-flecked mouth like the jaws of a wild beast, and the rough and scaly skin of a reptile – a constant succession of metamorphosing animals, not one of them containing anything of my original self. I drew what breath I could and bared my teeth to pronounce my name: ‘Felix Bellamy! I’m Felix Bellamy, born in Geneva on June 13th 1950!’ I shrieked at the top of my voice, and only then did I burst into tears. Terrible days followed: I no longer dared to speak. In the office I pretended to have lost my voice, I addressed my secretary in monosyllables, or using words I’d cautiously tried out beforehand, outside the door. At home in the evenings I’d read out loud from some work document, to see how serious the problem was – I could feel it spreading ominously within me. Inevitably it would recur: just when I felt the warm flow of words running evenly and freely from my throat, suddenly they would crumble into contorted syllables, become guttural stuttering sounds, then whistles. I tried to resist this transformation with all my might, twisting my neck, raising my chin, grinding my teeth, thrusting my tongue vainly backwards to free it from the knot which was throttling it at its root. But in the end all that remained of my voice was a raucous shout, gurgling like vomit from some unknown breach in my glottis. It all happened almost without my noticing, as though some other being had taken temporary possession of my mouth to use it as its own – some unknown and monstrous being which had made its way into my body and was struggling laboriously to come out into the world.