The Interpreter (4 page)

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 divan, 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.

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.