Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

It wasn’t a long book, but it was difficult, and because I was distracted, I did not do a very good job of translating it, even though I was working so hard and felt my mind was so sharp. What I put down in English was strange, as I saw later.

As long as I was reading the sentence to be translated, or writing down the translation of it, or reading an entry in the dictionary, I was absorbed in the words of these other people, not the voices of the characters in the novel, since they seldom spoke, but the voice of the author of the novel, and the dry, precise voices of the editors of the dictionary offering definitions of the words I looked up, and the livelier voices of the different writers quoted in the dictionary. But during the brief interval when I stopped typing and picked up the dictionary, an interval that could not have lasted more than five seconds, when I was not staring at any words but looking out the window, and these voices died away, his image would swim up between me and the work and cause a fresh pain just because I had forgotten him for a few minutes, or pushed him to the back of my mind with these words I was studying so closely.

I also had letters to write. I wrote one to the man whose book I was translating, and as I wrote, I looked at myself and said: Look at her, writing to this man, and at the same time she can’t stop thinking about that gas station attendant up the road. And yet the man I was writing to would have understood, because this was the sort of thing he wrote about in his novels.

I would work at my table, then I would often wash something, myself or something in the house, my clothes or something in the kitchen. I took one shower after another, scrubbing myself as if I could erase my body, rub out not only the dirt but my skin and my flesh, too, right down to my bones. I worked on the windows in my room. I cleaned both sides of every pane of glass until I could see through it as though it weren’t there, see the plants outside and the red terrace and the white underside of the arcade roof, which turned pink in wet weather, reflecting the wet red terrace.

It rained a great deal that month. The darkness would gather around, the clouds massing up, and the rain would fall, coming straight down, heavily, and then stop after a short time. The sun would come out and shine from a clear sky. Reflections from the puddles outside the house would move like snakes up the dark wooden cabinets in the kitchen. The sun heated the wet roof so quickly that steam rose from the black shingles all over and the wind blew it down off the eaves in clouds like smoke. After the sun had shone for a little while, the dark would come again suddenly, and I would look down the length of the room at my bed and see the dark spreading, as though from that corner, from the dark blankets on the bed.

I could not always do what I had to do. For instance, I could not always do even a small cleaning job, and I stepped in my own messes. Once it was a wide smear of tomato pulp I had left on the kitchen floor. I was walking around in my socks talking out loud to him. I stepped in the tomato pulp, and instead of changing my sock I lay down on the bed and read a story, a quiet, well-written, but dull story about deer hunting, while my damp foot, hanging off the edge of the bed, grew colder and colder.

I had to think clearly, make good decisions, make plans, and could not. I was in the wrong place to understand, either too far inside each thing or too far outside it. I would believe a thing was the right thing to do, and then wonder if I would soon believe the opposite. Sometimes I would know what I ought to do but have no will to act; at other times, I would have the will to act but not take action. And because I came up against myself this way, I had to wonder how I could change what I was, so that I would not always be this person I had to contend with, this person who defeated me.

Then I would stop questioning everything and become stubborn. I would withdraw into myself, keep my head down, and not care what anyone did to me or what I did to anyone.

On other days I could hardly stop moving, and my brain would not stop working. Everything I turned to seemed to have an idea in it. The concentration of solitude around me, so thick, seemed to make the ideas press in on me and feed me without interruption. Only if there was a leak in that balloon of solitude, some of what I might have thought would seep away. And every idea had to be written down, on any piece of paper at all, on a shopping list, in a checkbook, in the margins and blank pages of a book I was reading. It had to be written down so that I would not forget it, even though I knew that later some of these ideas wouldn’t seem worth remembering. And I was not always quick enough to write the thought down on paper and knew I had lost it and couldn’t recover it, and was as aware of that thought as though it were a blank space on a page. I would have been even sorrier if I hadn’t known that each thought was accidental anyway.

At these times, I talked fast on the telephone, I was impatient with everything that held me up, I did not want to bother eating, I did not eat until I was too distracted by hunger to go on thinking, and then I walked back and forth on the floor of my room while I ate. It was hard to eat anyway. There was already so much inside me, working so hard, that I had almost no room for food. I watched, as though I were outside myself, how my stomach turned when I tried to eat a bit of toast, biting and chewing slowly, swallowing a little at a time, the same with an apple. Sometimes I could swallow a little soup, or a bit of raw vegetable. It was bad one day, better the next.

I worked my body hard, walking, running, moving fast, and I began going to Ellie’s health club now and then, not for health, but because I thought that if I hardened my body I would beat out those quivering, jellylike emotions that were so uncomfortable. I grew thinner, my muscles became as hard as my bones, my arms and legs felt like pieces of jointed metal. My pants hung loose, and the ring on my middle finger slipped off easily.

I smoked more and more cigarettes, one every few minutes, smoked in bed, smoked in the car, and smoked walking out to the shops. My lungs were congested and I coughed dryly all day long. I had not stopped coughing since I returned home. At times the coughing kept me awake for hours and I would get up and eat a spoonful of honey or drink some water and then try to sleep again, swallowing over and over.

The nights were always the worst. I thought that at least I should be able to read a great deal, but it was hard to concentrate. It was hard to rest. I could not go to bed early. It was hard to get into bed and stop moving, and hardest of all to turn off the light and lie still. I could have covered my eyes and put earplugs in my ears, but that would not have helped. Sometimes I wanted to plug up my nostrils, too, and my throat, and my vagina. Bad thoughts came into bed and crowded up against me, bad feelings came in and sat on my chest so that I couldn’t breathe. I would lie on my right side, my bony knees pressing together until they were bruised, the right on top of the left and then, when I turned over, the left on top of the right. I would turn onto my back, then onto my stomach, first with my head on the pillow and then pushing the pillow aside and lying flat, then turning onto my right side again, holding the pillow between my knees and arms, then turning onto my back again and putting three pillows under my head, beginning to fall asleep and waking suddenly, startled by the fact that I was falling asleep.

I wondered, as though I were far away from all this, what would happen now, if I would eat less and grow thinner, if I would become still more occupied by the thought of him and go to further extremes in trying to make him talk to me and in searching for him.