Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  —URSULA LE GUIN, Dancing at the Edge of the World

  I woke up with Fred’s words ringing in my ears. I made coffee, turned on the computer, and surfed the Internet, cobbling together a Cliffs Notes version of translation theory. Clicking past the business-oriented sites and the reference sites, I focused on the academically oriented sites, with journals, book reviews, and forums on the nature and study of translation.

  One academic journal, called Palimpsestes, was devoted solely to translation issues between French and English. There were articles with titles like “Reflections on the Transposition of Clichés and Stereotypes” and “Not-So-Dead Metaphors: Reinvigorating Dead Metaphors in Moby Dick and Its French Translations.” An article on the difficulties of translating the Harlequin novel focused on the problem of preserving the tropes of the genre; another meditated on the complexities of adjective placement. Like most gold mines, it was totally overwhelming.

  It was also riddled with an unfamiliar vocabulary, with terms like “source text,” “target text,” “discourse,” “meta-contexts,” and “honorifics,” which referred to the various ways languages have of showing politeness, as in the French use of the second-person plural. I was entranced by “chuchotage,” a term used to describe the whispering of simultaneous interpretation into the client’s ear. It came from “chuchoter,” French for “to whisper,” but it sounded like something you did in bed. Maybe it was, if you spoke to your lover in a foreign language.

  My favorite new word was “idiolect,” defined as the “features of language variation characteristic of an individual speaker; [meaning] basically, everyone has a unique way of talking.” On another website, I came across the concept of “deverbalizing,” meaning “[to strip] away the words of the original document until we are left with only the representation of what the words describe” (Karla Déjean Le Féal, “Pédagogie raisonée de la traduction,” pp. 18–19). This notion suggested I ignore the words of the source text and privilege instead their meaning or feeling. Once free from the distraction of specific French words, I should be able to concentrate on finding the English words for the notions I’d isolated and understood. The author made translating seem like a scientific process, like curing olives or decaffeinating coffee.

  I kept stumbling onto the word “palimpsest.” From a college class, I remembered it referred to the ghostly shadows of erased words that remained, like clues, on Roman wax tablets and, later, on pricey recycled vellum back in the days before paper. Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, written in the nineteenth century about the fifteenth century, was a palimpsest of a book, set in a palimpsest of a city. The metaphor was unending and perfect, an infinity mirror, and I thought of it whenever I saw other iterations of Paris: old street signs, carved into stone above the modern painted metal ones, or fading vintage advertisements on the sides of buildings. The idea of looking for the ghost of the original had stayed with me.

  In translation, it is necessary to keep the ghost around as well, I thought now. Otherwise, you might stray too far from the original and start inventing things.

  I got up to make toast and thought about an article I’d read in the Los Angeles Times about language and brain tumors. Through experimental surgery, scientists had determined that language isn’t located in one section of the brain but spread out in nooks and crannies, like the melted butter in an English muffin commercial, with different areas for different languages. This means that if you had a stroke in one part of your brain and lost the ability to speak, the part of your brain that spoke another language might be able to retrain the damaged part to speak again.

  As I’d been obsessed with brain tumors at the time, I’d found this reassuring. But now I wondered if bilingual people had different styles in each language, or if they spoke certain subjects or feelings better in one language than the other, or if they were funnier or wittier in one language or the other.

  I ate breakfast, thinking about my new favorite word, “idiolects.” If everyone had a particular way of speaking—and this didn’t mean the voice-recognition spy technology of Hollywood movies but a style of slinging words together—could you recognize it, scientifically, and identify someone? Someone, say, who was writing a novel?

  Did it follow that if everyone had a particular way of speaking, everyone also ascribed slightly different, personal meanings to the same words we all shared?

  Maybe all language was translation, all words metaphors. Maybe we were always translating someone’s words into our own personal concept of what we thought he or she said. It’s amazing that we communicate at all. I pictured the brain as the universe, with neurons firing like comets and asteroids.

  I turned to the translation.

  Our last night in Venice, it began. Oh, right, they were still in Venice.

  Our last night in Venice, we ate cuttlefish and squid-ink pasta in a trattoria in Cannaregio. We held hands across the table like adolescents, pretending to have intelligent conversation about Italian writers: Svevo, Calvino, Buzzati. Afterward, we walked around the canals, lured by the dark sky, an invitation to discover the sinuous city. Eve spotted the new moon, a blurry sliver in the night. She turned and kissed me.

  “For luck,” she said, her voice breathless, hinting of melancholy.

  I felt it, too. Tomorrow, we would return to Paris, and the intrusions of the real world would not delay in finding us. Her hands wrapped around the back of my neck, and she pressed her face into my collar. I put my arms around her and rested my cheek against the top of her head. For a moment, nothing else mattered.

  She looked up, tugging on my coat lapels. Her mouth found mine. I pulled her into an alcove. We kissed in the shadows, our bodies pressed against each other…

  I got up for more coffee and peered outside. Right now, in late morning Paris, right this very moment, there were probably couples making out in alcoves, not to mention on balconies, park benches, street corners, sidewalks, while waiting for taxis, or sitting in the backseats of taxis. It was banal, commonplace, ordinary. Run-of-the-mill. Quelconque. I ran out of synonyms. I wondered where Olivier was.

  We strolled along the deserted streets, prolonging the evening as we glimpsed bits of Venetian life. Beneath an open window, the sounds of a soccer game on television blared into the night; through an arched glass door, the night manager of a small hotel turned the pages of a newspaper and pushed his glasses up his nose; down a narrow alley, an old woman stepped onto a balcony, shook out a tablecloth, and closed her shutters. We passed a foursome of elderly German tourists, who pointed at stone carvings and Madonnas, repeating “Das ist schön” in admiring voices.

  Then, no one. The city retired, and the cats took over. At the sound of our footsteps, they sprang away on agile feet, feline spies gone to warn their comrades…

  Clunky; a little arch. I made a note and stretched. My back was sore.

  It was then that I knew I’d fallen in love with her—while walking along a minor Venetian calle, whose name I didn’t think to retain. The realization was as startling and luminous as a lighthouse beacon slicing through a sky of ink. The world as I knew it crumbled. I grasped her shoulders, filled with dread.

  “What is it?” Eve asked. Her voice eased the constriction around my heart.

  “Nothing,” I answered, hoping she wouldn’t see the fear in my eyes.

  That night, we were nervous, careful around each other. I was clumsy. Eve was distant, aloof: even her hands were cold. But once we found our way back to each other, we were lost, swept up by a feverish ardor. Our lovemaking was heady, almost painful. A small, ragged cry escaped her lips, and I grabbed fistfuls of her hair.

  I couldn’t sleep. It felt as if there was someone watching us. I imagined the cherubs on the walls were conniving bookmakers, craftily setting the odds of our survival. You will pay for this interlude later, they seemed to say. I could hear them laughing. In the morning, I woke up knowing I’d dreamed I couldn’t sleep.

  Those few days we’d spent togethe
r existed in a bubble: a glass bubble, blown by a Murano craftsman; or a soap bubble, multihued, impossible to hold, as ephemeral and specific as the scent of her perfume on my collar when she kissed the side of my neck outside the Hotel Saturnia. I would not return to the same Paris I’d left. Our story had changed. Everything was different.

  I put the pages aside. I didn’t want to read about their trip back to Paris. All the signs were pointing to a bad ending. I wanted them to stay in Venice, walking along the canals, eating weird seafood, and telling each other stories. I wanted the rest of the novel to be that night, an endless night, a story that would stay put, fixed, in place, always on the edge of something, never tipping into it.

  You were supposed to outgrow “happily ever after”; it was a children’s phrase. But I wanted their story to end well. Was that too much to ask?

  It was time for lunch. “Inspire me!” I commanded the fridge, but the contents refused to oblige: shredded carrots, fromage blanc, a tube of harissa; below, in the freezer, frozen vegetables and salmon steaks in a sorrel sauce. On the ledge, the lovebird pigeons crooned their monotonous ballad.

  The smell of food wafted up, seemingly through the floorboards: roast chicken and buttery potatoes. I wondered who the cook was. Aside from the concierge and her husband, the only people I’d ever seen in the building were a Chinese family; a stocky man who was always carting sporting gear around; and a grim, redheaded woman who wore flowing capes and always seemed late for something.

  I poured sugar into the fromage blanc and took it back to the desk.

  We landed in Paris. Eve was distracted, as agitated as a little bird. I’d never seen her like that. I was preoccupied by the intolerable idea of returning to the apartment I shared with Daphne. Moreover, I suspected she would subject me to a raffle of questions about my invented business trip to Italy.

  I massaged my earlobe as I stared at the screen. Something was off. I homed in on the word “raffle” and cracked open the French-English dictionary. I’d mistranslated “une rafale,” which meant a squall or a hail, as in a hail of bullets. Maybe “a volley of questions”? Would Daphne “pepper him with questions”?

  Eve refused to let me take her home, insisting instead on a drink at La Closerie, though it was neither on my way home nor on hers. We sat at a small, round table.

  She further surprised me by ordering a kir, a drink she claimed to dislike. This was a warning sign, and I watched as she drank half of it, grimacing.

  “I can’t see you for a while,” she announced. She swallowed the other half of her drink. I could see the thin, ringed muscles working under the white skin of her neck.

  “What does that mean?” I asked, keeping my tone light.

  “I should have told you before, but I didn’t want to discuss it,” she said. “It is too tiresome.” Her voice turned soft, placating, as if she were already trying to make something up to me.

  “Eve—”

  “Please don’t argue, I hate it when you argue,” she said, and asked the waiter to call her a taxi. This little piece of melodrama was beneath her. It was third-rate penny theater. Baffled, I waited for an explanation. She gave me a quick, almost frightened glance. How was it that she could make such an ominous declaration, then look at me as if I was her executioner?

  Find a better equivalent for “bourreau,” I wrote in the margin. “Torturer”? It was associated with the devil, bedevilment, but perhaps too old-fashioned. “Oppressor,” maybe. If I couldn’t find a word, I’d have to use a phrase. “Tormentor”?

  She pulled on her black leather gloves, struggling to fasten the button on the inside of each wrist. Her fingers slipped, missing the buttonhole once, twice, before pulling it through.

  I knew her looks, her gestures. I knew the sly look that demanded I take her in my arms; I knew a one-shouldered shrug meant she was humoring me. She had a way of playing with her hair that sometimes meant melancholy, sometimes boredom. When had I started watching her so closely?

  She hadn’t buttoned her gloves once in Venice. Now, in that delicate gesture, I saw guilt. I thought of the man at Longchamp. I hadn’t asked her about him. Now I knew why. This was no penny opera. No, it was a story as famous as it was common.

  “Where are you meeting him?” I asked, conversationally. “Does he come to you, or do you go to him?” By her look of surprise, I knew I’d guessed correctly. I pulled out my wallet. “Go to your other lover, wherever he is. Give him my regards. Here’s fifty francs for the taxi,” I said, tossing a bill on the table. I spoke without thinking, as if I, too, were acting out a role I hadn’t known had been written for me.

  “I don’t—” she started, then stopped. We exchanged a long, cold stare: we were two strangers now, taking refuge from each other, instead of in each other. She bent her head. Her eyes shone with unshed tears, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t believe them.

  Ah, we were in French Movie Land. Everyone was being Very Dramatic. “It’s our Latin sensibility,” Pascal had explained once. After a Kieslowski film, Timothy had said, “All French movies are about sex, even when they’re not about sex.” I’d accused him of being reductive, but sometimes I thought he had a point.

  I wrenched my attention back to the text. Why was the narrator being such a jerk? So what if she had another lover? Dude, it’s not like you weren’t still sleeping with Daphne! The notion of fidelity among people who were having affairs eluded me. If the narrator was still sleep ing with the girlfriend, surely Eve had the right to sleep with someone else. Or were there ground rules I didn’t know about?

  I turned the page. There were only three sentences.

  One moment, she was there.

  Then she was gone.

  I never saw her again.

  I groaned and tossed the pages in the air. I went into the kitchen and found the Nutella, right where I’d hidden it, behind the canned kidney beans. Spoon in one hand, jar in the other, I went back to find out what happened to Eve in the next chapter. I suspected something bad was imminent: maybe she was going to die or throw herself off a bridge into the Seine. My cell phone twittered. A text message from Olivier read, “I’ll b back soon. I miss u. Love, yr French lover.” I laughed and wrote back: “Which French lover?” A minute later, he sent back “Steve McQueen, bien sûr.”

  Daphne wasn’t there when I returned to the apartment. I deposited my bags and went for a walk by the river to clear my head. The wind agitated the surface of the Seine, and I thought of the giant waves of Biarritz, where I’d spent summers with my grandparents after my mother died. My father lived there now, with his second wife, in the old stone house near the water. He liked Daphne; he was pleased I was finally building a life.

  I stood on the Pont Neuf and looked out at the fading light. Cars zoomed by on the embankment. The wind whipped my skin and cut through my coat, and there was an unpleasant metallic taste in my mouth. At the place Dauphine, three small boys careened between trees and benches as they kicked an orange ball around the triangular square. Brightly lit restaurants beckoned, but the tables were empty. It was too early for dinner, too late for tea; it was, in fact, the hour of the aperitif, the right time for a drink with your lover, if she hadn’t just left you, in a way that felt definitive.

  I sat on a bench and shoved my hands in my pockets. Even though thinking it felt like a curse, I knew she’d ended it between us. The thought of never seeing her again was unfathomable. I wanted to believe I was merely imagining the worst, but that was a childish ploy to allay my feelings. An ache manifested itself in my chest, to my surprise, and I heaved forward. My head dropped into my hands…

  I knew the place: I could picture it. I felt bad for Jean-Marc. As much as it was a fine place for lovers, Paris for the heartbroken? Not so great.

  I flipped open my phone and reread Olivier’s messages, giggling like a teenager.

  23

  Le verbe aimer est difficile à conjuguer: son passé n’est pas simple, son présent n’est qu’indicatif, et son futur est
toujours conditionnel.*

  —JEAN COCTEAU

  Eve vanished from my life.

  I stewed in my anger, convinced I’d been right about her—she was an opportunist, a heartless manipulator who felt nothing for me. But when my anger wore off, and I still hadn’t heard from her, I began to wonder what had happened. It didn’t seem possible that she’d left me because of one ugly scene.

  She didn’t answer the phone. She didn’t answer my letters. At night, I waited outside her building. The lights were never on. The concierge hadn’t seen her.

  On the landing, I accosted the cleaning lady, Madame de Sousa, a Portuguese woman of fifty in a tartan coat, toting a matching carrier with a black poodle inside. When I introduced myself as a friend, she smirked and told me she hadn’t seen Madame in weeks. The poodle leaped out of its carrier and danced around my ankles.

  I persisted, asking if there was any sign of Eve, dishes in the sink, for instance, or used towels in the bathroom. She raised a sharply penciled black brow.

  “You are not the police?” she asked. I shook my head. “So, you are some sort of lunatic,” she continued, “and me, I am supposed to help you? Ah, no!” She made a ferocious sound of disapproval, pulled her hat down, and marched away. The poodle trotted behind her. I watched as my only connection to Eve strode down the stairs.

  “Please, madame, I’m not crazy, I’m not the police, I just need to see her—I’m very unhappy without her,” I pleaded, chasing after her. Madame de Sousa looked me up and down, scrutinizing my appearance. “You are my only hope,” I added.