Foreign Tongue

by Vanina Marsot

  It was time to leave. Living in Paris wasn’t good for me anymore. I was sinking into morbid depression. The nightmares felt malevolent, a sign of imminent decline.

  I ate cornflakes out of a bowl, one by one, like miniature potato chips, and jotted down a list of things to do, a game plan for returning to L.A. First, I’d get in touch with George, my old boss, in case he’d jumped into a new job and could throw me some work. Then I’d need to e-mail my tenant and tell him the sublet was ending.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee. Tell Tante Isabelle. Finish the translation and get my last check from Monsieur Laveau. Say good-bye. I burst into tears.

  I missed Olivier. I didn’t have a real job or a real reason for staying. Outside, it was gray. It was probably sunny in California. I thought about my desk, my work rituals, deliveries from Juan, my FedEx guy editorial meetings. I remembered work as a refuge, a cure, the thing that put things in perspective and distracted me. The French call overthinking your problems du nombrilisme. Belly button–ism.

  I needed to make work work for me. Unwieldy on a T-shirt, but it summed matters up. I turned on the computer and waited for it to boot up. I thought about how I’d become more efficient at breaking up sinuous, multi-claused French sentences into shorter English ones. I wondered whether I was doing the author a disservice: he wrote complicated, meandering sentences. That was his style. It wasn’t an amazing style, and he wasn’t writing great literature, but he did have a style, and here I was, turning it into something else, repackaging it so it read well in English. Maybe the truest translation would be as convoluted and flowery as the original. Or retain a measure of convolutedness and floweriness.

  On the other hand, I could count on Monsieur Laveau to tell me if he didn’t like my work. I had to assume he read English well enough to judge. I pulled out the pages. A note fell from the envelope and fluttered to the floor.

  It was a long, thin piece of paper, like a bookmark but with perforations on the top. Written with a fountain pen in a congested, shaky scrawl, it said: “Mon cher Bernard, voici le dernier chapitre…”

  It was a note from Monsieur X, telling Bernard this was the last chapter.

  “Les traductions me plaisent, plus ou moins, mais je n’ai plus envie de le faire publier.”

  That was odd. He didn’t want to publish it any longer? Then why was I translating it?

  “On en reparlera. Amitiés…”

  It was signed with a scribbled flourish. An initial, or initials, I couldn’t read; possibly two initials superimposed one on top of the other, but totally indecipherable. S.G.? G.S.? E.S.? E.G.? G.E.? G.G.? Maybe a stylized F, or C, or an extravagant L.

  I groaned in frustration. Rereading it, I smarted a bit about “The translations please me, more or less,” but why didn’t he want to publish it any longer? It was maddening: in my hand, I held a note to Bernard from Monsieur X. A note in his handwriting. With his initials. Which I couldn’t read. It was both frustrating and strangely intimate, as bizarre and useless as owning, say, a pair of his socks.

  This was the last chapter. He didn’t want to publish it anymore. D.S.? Z.S.?

  Initials bounced around my head like crazy, gumball-dispenser rubber balls. I doodled on the envelope, trying to copy the scribbled initials to see if I could make sense of them. Then it came to me, like a whisper: initials. I opened my file of last week’s translation and combed through the names, making a list.

  “A small role in a soft-porn film by the Italian filmmaker Alessandro Diavoli made her a minor cult celebrity and introduced her to the film’s financial backer, Gilbert Dessès.”

  A.D. G.D. I continued looking.

  “He was seventeen years her senior and married to a French writer, Véronique Boutros…Over the next few years, she became involved with an American investment banker, P. Stanley Carruthers; a French publisher, Bertrand L’Huissier; and a French journalist, Alexi Barthès-Levinsky.”

  V.B., P.C. or P.S.C. or S.C., B.L. or B.L.H., sort of. A.B. or A.B.L.

  Hah! Double hah! Even triple hah!

  There it was: B.L. He was even a French publisher. Hello, Bernard Laveau. And A.B., a French journalist, as in Antoine Berlutti. He wasn’t a journalist, but writer was close enough. That left Véronique Boutros as Victorine Berlutti. Coincidence, or was I onto something? Could it be a roman à clef about people I actually knew?

  I scrolled through my computer files of the previous two endings, looking for corroboration on the other characters’ initials. None of them matched up with anyone I knew. Maybe it was just this chapter. I looked at the initials again. B.L., A.B., V.B. It had to be them: it wasn’t just the initials; the careers matched up as well.

  Maybe Antoine was the author. He’d just finished a book, after all. When I’d met him, he’d claimed he and Bernard weren’t friendly, but Bernard had found him the Villiers de L’Isle-Adam first editions. What were they up to? Was that why he’d befriended me? Why he always asked about the translation? Could he be that devious?

  I Googled Victorine again. Her biography showed she’d been married once before, to an Austrian playwright, but his initials didn’t match. Her bibliography contained nothing remotely resembling the title The Many Lives of a Femme Fatale. Rats. I scrolled through a list of her articles. There was one entitled La séduction et les mots, but it wasn’t available online. While I was at it, I checked Amazon.fr and Fnac.com, but as I suspected, The Many Lives of a Femme Fatale was not a real book.

  The author could be Antoine. Or, come to think of it, Victorine. I needed to get ahold of something each of them had written and compare their writing styles. I wasn’t ruling Bernard out, either, even though he’d scoffed at me when I’d suggested it.

  Or the initials were coincidence.

  That left me with Les Editions Pas de Mule, which I Googled. The publishing company was located on the rue du Pas de la Mule, off the place des Vosges. It was a play on words: “Pas de la Mule” meant the steps or paces of a mule, but without the article, it meant “no mule.” They didn’t have much of a website, but their book list showed they specialized in political nonfiction. None of the authors’ names meant anything to me. Monsieur X could be here, but I had no way of finding him. I needed a list of the people Bernard edited, or at least a list of his friends, but short of stealing his address book, I didn’t see how to get one. I gnawed my thumbnail. I was almost onto something, but it was a slippery eel of a feeling. I needed another clue.

  36

  Il ne faut pas laisser les intellectuels jouer avec des allumettes.*

  —JACQUES PRÉVERT, “Il ne faut pas…”

  A few days later, I took a long walk to Antoine and Victorine’s in Montmartre. I rang the doorbell, and Antoine opened it with a warm smile.

  “Alors, chère amie, comment ça va?” he asked, taking my coat. He looked dapper in a camel hair jacket over a red striped shirt. “Victorine!” he shouted. “Anna est là!” He ushered me into the salon. “Would you like tea? Or shall we push l’heure de l’apéro?” he asked with a mischievous grin.

  “Qu’est ce que vous me proposez?” I asked, smiling back.

  “Un petit whiskey?” he suggested. “Du Xérès? Un Lillet?”

  “Un Lillet, je veux bien essayer,” I said. I’d never tried the old-fashioned aperitif. Antoine served it with lemon rind in a thin crystal glass etched with flowers. He poured himself a finger of whiskey and held it up to the light.

  “Laphroaig. A gift from my publisher,” he explained. “Tchin.” The Lillet was sweet, not unpleasantly medicinal, one of those French drinks whose ingredients were impossible to divine: probably a blend of vegetable roots or mountain herbs.

  “I like this,” I said. He held out a dish of salted nuts. I took one and bit into a rancid almond. I looked around for a paper napkin to spit it into, but there were only little linen cocktail squares on the table. I grimaced and swallowed. He didn’t notice.

  “So, what did you do this past weekend?” I asked, shamelessly transparen
t.

  “We went to the theater,” he said, squinting at me. “But I’m so dull! Of course you know. Your friend Olivier’s play,” he exclaimed.

  “I’m so sorry I missed it,” I said blandly. “I’m sure it was wonderful,” I prodded.

  “Estelle is magnificent on film, but she hasn’t been on the stage in years, and les mauvaises langues would have been happy to see her fail,” he said, looking at me. Then he gave a start and looked away, as if he realized that looking at me at that precise moment might be indelicate. I tried to keep my face impassive, because even though I was one of the “bad tongues” who might have been pleased to hear she’d fallen flat on her face, I didn’t want it to show. While I wouldn’t have wished catastrophic failure on Olivier’s play, a kind of middling mediocrity would have been just dandy.

  “But no,” he continued. “She was excellent. Her costars, too. Well-directed, if I can pretend to such discernment. The play, alors là”—he raised a hand—“it has flaws, lacks intellectual rigor. But it makes up for it in emotion. A satisfying experience.”

  “I’m so glad,” I said, which was a blatant untruth. “I’m not sure I’ll go. Olivier and I had a falling-out, you see,” I said casually.

  He nodded and clamped a pipe between his teeth. There was a wealth of information between us: what he knew, what I knew. I looked at my glass. The lemon rind had curled into an O. I went over to the oil painting.

  “I’d remembered it as repulsive,” I mused, “but it doesn’t look at all repulsive to me now. After the feast, the insects appear…the dead pheasant, the half-eaten bread, the cheese—it’s life, isn’t it?” It came out dull, a platitude.

  “You could see it that way,” he said. Victorine strode in, wearing an olive green twin set and a rope of pearls. She grasped my shoulders and kissed me on both cheeks.

  “How are you, dear girl?” she asked in a hearty tone.

  “Fine, th-thank you,” I stuttered, surprised by her friendliness.

  “We were just talking about Anna’s translating work,” Antoine said, matching my earlier lie with one of his own.

  “Yes?” she asked, pouring herself a small whiskey. “I enjoyed our last conversation. Tell me, have you always been a translator?”

  “No, I wrote PR copy,” I said.

  “It is not so different,” Antoine remarked. “In both cases, you are putting someone else’s words into another form.” He looked at Victorine.

  “Yes, but you remain invisible,” she said with a thoughtful look. “Tell me, I know so little about you. What was your childhood like?” She leaned forward, all ears. An apéro with Mr. and Mrs. Freud.

  “Fine. Average,” I said. “I grew up in L.A., but I was sent away a lot, to France, in the summer. Mostly to stay with my grandmother, which is how I learned French.”

  “Was she a grand-mère gâteau, or a strict, severe type?” she asked.

  “Both,” I said. “And capricious. Not predictable at all,” I said, thinking back.

  “Ah, so you had to be careful. Do you feel more French or American?”

  People often asked me this question. There was no easy answer. “I feel both. Most of the time, I feel at home in both places, but sometimes I feel French in the U.S., and American in France. I guess like most people with mixed backgrounds.”

  “Hence your fluidity in two cultures, two languages,” she said. “You had to learn to fit in, adapt quickly, a chameleon—”

  This was sort of true, and I opened my mouth to agree, but Antoine jumped in.

  “But also the need to remain in the shadows, not conspicuous, already a spy—”

  “The question of identity, always shifting, never defined—” she said.

  “At home everywhere and nowhere—” he added.

  “Always on the outside, looking in—” she countered.

  “Not rea—” I tried to say, but they were off, riffing back and forth.

  “She marries a Frenchman, a soldier, who dies in North Africa—”

  “Naturally, she volunteers for service—”

  “Before her tragic end at Ravensbrück!” Victorine said. Baffled, I looked at them. “But I don’t know if she keeps the child,” she added. “It might be too tragic.”

  “A toi de décider,” Antoine said, lighting his pipe. The white cat I’d seen the last time crawled out from under the sofa and leaped into my lap.

  “Non, Grisbi!” Victorine scooped the cat up in her arms and left the room.

  “She is writing a movie script based on a World War Two spy who was half-English, half-French,” Antoine explained, pouring himself another drink. “She’s probably abandoned us for her desk.”

  “It looked like you were having fun,” I offered.

  “She is my best critic, and I hers, I like to think,” he said. “But what about you? Tell me, how is your translation? What’s the story again?” he asked, as if he’d known and had forgotten. I said nothing. “Bon. What can you tell me?” he asked, smiling.

  “Aside from telling you the author is anonymous and I’ve no clue who he is, nothing,” I said. “I’m sworn to secrecy. I’ve signed papers.”

  Antoine rubbed his chin. The cloying, sweet pipe smoke filled the room. “So, when you asked me who Bernard edits, it was because…”

  “Idle curiosity.” I shrugged. “I know so little about him.”

  “I know what you’re up to, my dear,” he said, waving his pipe at me.

  “Enfin. Bernard knows so many people. You may be translating someone he does not edit at all. But tell me, I thought he’d acquired a new manuscript by Le Jaa?”

  I shrugged. “He may have, but I doubt it’s this one.”

  “You’re sure?” He looked disappointed.

  “Positive. It’s a totally different style,” I said, shaking my head. “What’s more, I doubt Bernard would give a new Le Jaa to a novice translator.”

  “Ah, well,” he said philosophically. “Perhaps it will remain a mystery.” He leafed through a book on the mantel. Now that I’d made it clear I wasn’t translating Le Jaa’s book, he didn’t seem as interested in talking to me. By contrast, this did make it seem less likely that either he or Victorine was the author of my book.

  “But if I were to try to figure out who my author is…” I said.

  “I just thought of something my author wrote,” he said. “He believed the imagination was more beautiful than real life.” He ran his fingers over a leather book. “‘Science will not suffice. Sooner or later you will end by coming to your knees…Before the darkness!’” he quoted, pointing his index finger in the air like a Roman orator.

  “The darkness,” I repeated. They were both a little strange today, the married writers. I stood up to go. At the door, I could hear Victorine typing as a tinny transistor radio blared classical music. I kissed Antoine good-bye and went down the stairs.

  Outside, it was brisk and sunny. I walked around Montmartre. It didn’t change, Montmartre: still the same bad art, souvenir shops, crowds, and inevitably, someone strumming “Hotel California” in front of the Sacré-Cœur. I sat on the steps and looked out at the view, which reminded me of the view from a Japanese restaurant in the Hollywood Hills, the same orientation. I picked out Notre Dame, Saint-Eustache, Beaubourg, the Eiffel Tower, and the Grand Palais before heading down the hill to the métro.

  When I think back on that time, it startles me to realize just how foolish I was, how little I knew. In my arrogant, ignorant youth, I thought I knew the world. I assumed life was a mystery; that once solved, it would work like a well-oiled machine: predictable, ordinary. Until I met Eve, nothing had challenged these precepts.

  I revisited that last scene between us countless times, each time coming up with yet another speech, another formula to make her stay.

  Verbier’s information was trite and inconsequential. He was a terrible private detective, though I spent a small fortune on his services before I discovered it. From what I could glean from his inane reports, I concluded t
hat Eve had left me for reasons I could spend the rest of my life trying to discover.

  Daphne and I parted ways. She completed her dissertation, became a sought-after political consultant, married a lawyer, and produced four children in rapid succession, one of whom became my godson. I directed my energy into my work. My career became the driving force in my life.

  A series of articles I’d written on the looming economic crisis and the potential role of alternative sources of energy caught the eye of Monsieur K—, who appointed me his economic adviser when he became an important figure in the Mitterrand government.

  I married my secretary, Magda Szabo, a Hungarian émigré six years my senior. We were, if not happy, comfortable. Magda could not have children, so we considered adoption, but after many disappointments, we gave up. She became involved with fund-raising for an orphanage in Budapest, traveling to that city several times for extended visits. We divorced when she told me she’d fallen in love with a UN aid worker.

  I missed her company, but while there was no one significant in my life, I was not often alone.

  Then, one day, as if released from the most banal of curses, I found Eve again.

  This chapter read like a confession, an autobiography.

  Eve had been living in London and had become well-known, even famous.

  That was coy. “For what???” I scribbled in pencil in the margin.

  I was invited to dinner at the house of an old friend, Christopher, a Labour MP who happened to be a friend of her brother’s. Dinner for twenty-four at a house in St. John’s Wood, surrounded by landscape watercolors and Arts and Crafts woodwork. Eve provided the glamour, resplendent in blue-violet silk, her glossy hair cut short.