“I asked you repeatedly about the rights situation, Cassandra,” Jane fumed. “And you said she didn’t want to be published in Spain or Argentina.”
“That’s absolutely true,” I said, prepared to defend my position again. “She’s writing under a pen name and she’s afraid of repercussions.”
“Then how do you account for the fact that the book has just been published in Madrid?”
“Madrid? Impossible!” I sputtered. “Completely impossible. Elvira doesn’t…I mean, she could never, I mean, she would never allow…”
“Elvira not only allowed it,” Jane snapped. “She’s promoting it like crazy. She’s not only alive and well, but she’s not living in Reykjavík. She’s living in Madrid. And her face is all over the literary pages of Spain’s newspapers. It’s a face that, I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, you claimed she refused to have photographed.”
“Face? Photograph? It must be a joke. I told you, she’s reclusive and practically certifiable.”
“Don’t toy with me, Cassandra.” And Jane rang off.
A short time later, a messenger arrived at my door with an envelope from Jane. It contained a batch of clippings from the Spanish newspapers. The face, long, narrow, with heavily made-up eyes, looked completely unfamiliar. I raced through the reviews and interviews, looking for some clue.
“I always wanted to write,” she said in one. “But I never believed that my experiences in Iceland would be any use to me. I thought that to write I would have to write directly about the situation in Buenos Aires, and that I thought I could never do.”
“What changed your mind?” the reporter asked.
“A conversation I had with a stranger some years ago in a cafe,” said the false Elvira. “She seemed so fascinated in my descriptions of the snow and the great sadness of that time in my life, that I tried to see what I could make of it.”
The liar, the worse-than-plagiarizer, the thief.
She wasn’t Elvira Montalban. She was Maria Escobar. I remembered her now.
It had been a chance encounter in a cafe in Paris some years ago. An intriguing but not particularly attractive woman, wearing, although it was spring and getting warmer, a half-length jacket. A jacket of rather soiled sheepskin. When she took it off, her dress was surprisingly chic, but also rather soiled, with permanent stains under the arms. She was between forty and fifty, with dyed black hair in a heavy bun, no earrings or other jewelry. She sat at a table outdoors that afternoon, sheltered from the wind. A familiar place. The waiter seemed to know her, but not to like her particularly. Once or twice when she spoke to him, he ignored her for the second it took to let her know she was unimportant to him, and then, “Oui, Madame?” And this, too, seemed familiar. She was not insulted. She seemed to expect it. A foreigner in some way, yet her French was excellent.
She took out a portfolio of papers, and two or three small dictionaries, and began to work. I understood immediately. She was a translator. Back and forth her eyes scanned, and her writing was rhythmic and assured. Occasionally she looked up a word, but for the most part it seemed routine work, and not particularly engaging.
Eventually I struck up a conversation with her, in French that quickly turned to Spanish, that was restrained at first, and then more voluble. I had the sense she had not talked with anyone for a long time, and certainly not about her life. She was from Argentina, had spent a time in prison there and had gotten out with the help of Amnesty International, which had sent her to Denmark. There she had married an Icelandic businessman who had taken her back to his country. She didn’t live in Reykjavík any longer. They had divorced; for some years she had lived in Paris. She had some work that was fairly unsatisfying in a multinational corporation translating back and forth from Spanish to English to French. Documents of some sort. I remember how her long fingers, with their unkempt nails, fiddled nervously with the papers. Several times she told me that she had a deadline the next day. And yet she made no move to leave.
Nor did I. The waiter ignored us. We let our conversation roam. I listened a great deal, watched her face. Her lipstick was an old-fashioned shade of burgundy and had flaked dryly at the corners of her mouth. She had a faint mustache. She seemed a woman with her life behind her. “I wanted so much more for myself once,” I remember her telling me, and the words floated up in the spring evening air, for twilight had supplanted afternoon.
“What did you want?”
“To write,” she said.
“Everybody wants to be a writer,” I said. “I’ve often thought of it myself, being a translator.”
“But I really wanted it,” she told me.
We kissed when we parted and promised to keep in touch, but I was on my way from Paris to Mozambique to visit a friend, and I lost her card almost immediately.
I had not thought of her again, until I saw her photograph in the newspaper.
The cheek of it. Those stories she told me that day long ago were nothing like what I’d written. Or were they? In truth, I had forgotten the substance of what she’d told me. I only remembered the cafe, the waiter, the scent of spring, the way she tapped the papers under her fingers.
But she wasn’t going to get away with this. Jane would make sure I never worked as a translator again in England or America, if I didn’t get a handle on this and fast.
I called my local bucket shop and got a flight that same evening for Madrid.
Life in Spain, and especially Madrid, doesn’t really get going until around midnight, so even though it was after ten when my friends Sandra and Paloma met me at the airport, they told the taxi driver to head into the center, to the Puerto del Sol. First, for old times’ sake, we did the rounds of half a dozen bars. In some we had a pincho, a mouthful, and in others a racíon, a plateful. Squid, octopus, shrimp—all fine with me, though I drew the line at tripe and recognizable parts of pigs. We drank a little red wine at each place and then moved on. Eventually we had dinner, and afterward joined the throngs of Madrileños, jamming the sidewalk cafes and narrow streets. It was a May night, warm but not too hot, and it seemed perfectly normal to be wandering around a large city at three a.m. without a fear in the world. We finished up the evening with a Guinness at an Irish bar Sandra and Paloma had recently discovered.
At four we took a taxi to their modern new apartment building far into the suburbs. Sandra and Paloma had come up in the world. When I first knew them, Sandra was on leave from the University of York, writing her dissertation on Women in Nineteenth-century Madrid, and teaching an English class at the university; and Paloma was a struggling scriptwriter. Now Sandra was a professor here and Paloma worked on a hugely successful television show called ¿Quién sabe dónde? or Who Knows Where?
“It’s just a missing person show,” Sandra explained, as Paloma popped a tape of a recent show in the VCR, “but somehow it’s tapped into the national psyche. Everybody watches it religiously.”
“I write the scripts,” said Paloma. “I have a lot of fun. Of course it’s all supposed to be completely true.”
The video showed a distraught mother on the phone to her daughter, pleading with her to come home. Strangely enough, a film crew seemed to be right in the mother’s pink-and-blue bedroom with her, as well as in the disco where her daughter was shouting, “I hate you, I’ll never come home!” into the receiver.
¿Quién sabe dónde? reminded me of Maria Escobar, the word thief. Who knew where she was, indeed? I’d told Sandra and Paloma I was in Madrid to meet with the author of La academia de la melancholía, but I hadn’t told them the whole story.
“Yes, that book is very well-known,” they told me. “The author seemed to come out of nowhere and is a great success. We have a copy if you’d like to read it.”
“Oh just leave it around,” I said casually. But as soon as they were in bed, I grabbed it and spent the rest of the night reading La academia de la melancholía. The same plot, the same characters, the same mood. Everything the same. Except the words. The Spanish wa
s excellent, beautiful, much better than my original Spanish had been, the Spanish I’d written down those snowy mornings well over a year ago in Reykjavík. How could that be? This was a translation of my work from English. But it read as though it was the original Spanish.
Saturday night we went out on the town again, and Sunday we drove to a small village outside the city to visit Paloma’s mother. Paloma might be a high-rolling, chain-smoking TV executive during the week, but on Sundays she wore a plain dress and flat shoes and helped her mother make dinner.
On Monday I called Elvira Montalban’s publishing house and requested a meeting with the author. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” the receptionist said. “Our authors don’t have time to meet with readers.”
“But I’m her…English translator. I came especially from London to meet her.”
“In that case, I’ll see what I can do.”
She rang back in fifteen minutes to say that Elvira had agreed to meet me the following day for lunch. “She’s looking forward to it,” the receptionist told me.
The restaurant where Maria-Elvira suggested we meet was a typical mesón, a dimly lit inn with a wood oven, a tile floor, and oak beams. The specialties of such places were offal dishes and a chickpea-chorizo stew, known as cocido.
I had plenty of time to study the menu and mull over the predilection of Madrileños for brains and intestines and stomach linings, not to mention pig trotters, ears, and even snouts. Maria-Elvira was late, so late that I thought she wasn’t going to show. When she finally appeared, I was amazed at the change in her. She looked elegant and well-dressed, no longer with her hair bundled up and her make-up too thick, no longer wearing clothes that seemed wrong somehow. Her face was still long, her brows still heavy, but her hair was fashionably cut and streaked and her lips were a luscious shade of crimson. She made her way over to my table with determined grace, a woman who had found her role.
“Well,” she said in Spanish. “We meet again, my friend.” She kissed my cheek lightly, as if we were great pals.
I couldn’t help it. I admired her. She looked the part of Elvira Montalban so much better than I ever could, me with my wild Irish hair and freckles, with my working-class fears of making a social faux-pas. Maria-Elvira looked Spanish, she looked intellectual, she looked like a writer.
Stop it! I told myself. Elvira Montalban is your creation. This Maria Escobar is nothing but an opportunist.
I handed her my menu without speaking.
“The menu del día is very good here,” she said, without looking at the menu. “Unless you prefer tripe or brains.”
I shook my head. She gestured confidently to the waiter and gave him our order, two cocidos, then turned to me with a slight smile that showed her rather large teeth.
I found that I was almost intimidated by her. In Paris, she’d had the look of a displaced person, marginalized by history and geography. She had spoken softly and timidly to the cafe waiter and had cringed when he turned his back on her. She had seemed to me one of those people in the world who have been hurt rather badly, and in many different ways, so that they do not spring back.
Now she did not shrink. Now she took up space.
“Not many of these old places left,” she said conversationally. She took out a pack of cigarettes, offered them to me, and then lit up. She hadn’t smoked before, but now she seemed to luxuriate in it. She poured wine from the carafe and took a drink. Then she called the waiter over and ordered a better bottle.
“How long have you been in Madrid?” I asked her grudgingly.
“Oh, about two years, perhaps. I stayed on in Paris for a while, but of course I was really dying there, I see that now. I thought at first I was homesick, so I decided to go back to Buenos Aires. But naturally, once I got there, after twenty years away, I realized that everything had changed and I had no place there anymore. I spent about six unhappy months, and then decided to come to Madrid, and to do what I’d always wanted to do, which was to write. Of course, my stay in Argentina was very useful in that it put me in mind of old familiar places, and especially a kind of mood I wanted for my book.”
Cocido is usually served in three courses. The first of these, a rich broth with a little rice, now arrived. I thought, This woman must be a schizophrenic. She’s actually convinced herself that she’s Elvira Montalban. She sounds like she’s giving an interview to a newspaper.
“And you, Cassandra,” she said, sipping her broth appreciatively. “What have you been up to? Still travelling as much as ever? You were off to Mozambique then as I recall.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Still travelling. That is, when I’m not writing.”
“So you’re writing too?” No, she wasn’t insane. There was a twinkle in her eye. As if this were all a joke.
“You know perfectly well what I’ve been writing.”
“I don’t, really,” she answered, dabbing gently at the corners of her mouth. “Is it something based on your experiences, or did you borrow someone else’s?”
Just then a couple of men, middle-aged, genial, expensively suited, entered the restaurant. Maria-Elvira waved them over. They all kissed and then she introduced them to me.
“My publisher,” she said, “and my editor. This is Cassandra Reilly. She translated my book into English.”
“Ah, yes, an unusual case,” said the publisher. “It’s not often where the translation comes out before the original.”
“I’d tried many publishing houses and had been turned down,” said Maria-Elvira sweetly. “Without the book’s success in England and America, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have had a chance in Spain.”
“Well, the novel never crossed my desk,” said the editor. “I’m sure I would have noticed it.”
They settled at a table in the corner, out of earshot. The second course of the cocido arrived: chickpeas, with the vegetables from the stew, cabbage, leeks, onions, turnips. Maria-Elvira attacked it with relish.
“You set this up, didn’t you?” I said. “Suggesting we meet at the restaurant where you know they always eat. It wasn’t coincidental.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Maria-Elvira said. “Now where were we? Your writing? Yes. You were telling me where you get your ideas.”
“You stole my book,” I said. “You’re not Elvira Montalban. You’re Maria Escobar.”
“You stole my life.”
“I made the stories up. They’re not realistic. They’re fantastical.”
“You took my stories about my preparatory school and about my teachers, and you turned them into something else. You put the school in the future, and let the snow fall and gave it a fancy name. But it’s my life. You captured my life perfectly.”
“Living a life is not the same as writing about it,” I said, but I faltered slightly.
“That chapter where the girl from the happy family sees her parents dragged off by the militia? That conversation in the interrogation chamber? That clandestine love affair between the powerful professor and the young student? I could name several more, many more scenes that were just as I told you. Didn’t I tell you too about my terribly sad marriage to the Icelander and those dreadful winters we passed in Reykjavík, hardly speaking while the snow fell on and on? Didn’t I?”
Her voice sounded so familiar to me. As if it were an inner voice of mine made visible. As if the cadences of her speech were something I’d written down from dictation.
The waiter asked me if I’d finished my second course. I’d hardly touched it, though Maria-Elvira had finished hers. He brought the third and final plate: a pile of meat—beef, chorizo, blood sausage, some bits of unidentified organs and, poking out from the middle of the pile, a pig’s trotter.
Instead of tackling it immediately, as she had the other two courses, Maria-Elvira brought out a pile of papers from her bag. “You see, I’ve already been writing my second novel. The publisher has accepted it. It will be published next year.”
“You can’t do that. You’re not
Elvira. I’m Elvira.”
“Have you written anything more by Elvira Montalban?”
I had to admit that no, I had not.
“Because you have nothing to say. You have no stories to tell, now that you have used up mine. But I still have stories to tell.”
I opened my mouth, but stopped. My story was that of an Irish-Catholic girl from Kalamazoo. I had been inventing myself as a traveller and translator since I left home. I had no stories that I wanted to tell, no stories that were either true or literary, no stories I thought anyone would want to hear.
Now Maria-Elvira began to eat, and gestured to me to join her. “I’ve always found this dish so curious, how it’s served. Separating all the parts out, the broth, the vegetables, the meat. It’s quite a metaphor, don’t you think? My ideas were the broth, nourishing but thin; your translation the vegetables, good but not filling. And my final version is the meat, chewy, spicy, substantial.”
“You call it a final version. You don’t call it a translation?”
“They were my words to start out with and now they’re my words again. You will never write another book, Cassandra Reilly, but I will write a dozen more. I’m a writer now. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened.”
“I know how it happened,” I began, but in truth I didn’t know. The process from nobody to novelist was just as mysterious to me as it had ever been.
The editor and publisher came over again. “I was just telling Cassandra about my next book,” said Maria-Elvira, patting the manuscript beside her.
“It’s quite brilliant from what I’ve seen,” said the editor. “We expect it to have an even greater success than La academia de la melancholía.”
“Now all we need is title,” said the publisher. “Has anything come to you yet?”
“Yes,” said Maria-Elvira. She pushed her plate away. All that was left of the meat course was the bones. “I’m thinking of calling it simply The Translator.”
The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Page 20
