Paul Auster - Invisible

Walker smiles at Cécile in an attempt to dissolve the image, and as she smiles back at him-a bit puzzled, but apparently pleased by the attention-he wonders if this kind of debauchery doesn’t explain why Born is so keen on marrying Hélène. He is struggling to turn his back on himself, to resist his sordid, malevolent urges, and she represents respectability to him, a wall against his own madness. Walker notes how decorously he behaves with Hélène, addressing her by the formal vous instead of the more intimate, familiar tu . It is the language of counts and countesses, the language of marriage in the highest reaches of the upper class, and it creates a distance from both self and world that serves as a form of protection. It is not love that Born is looking for but safety. The libidinous Margot brought out the worst in him. Will the calm and repressed Hélène turn him into a new man? Dream on, Walker says to himself. A person of your intelligence should know better than to think that.

By the time they place their orders, Walker has been told that Hélène works as a speech pathologist at a clinic in the fourteenth arrondissement. She has been in the profession since the early fifties-in other words, long before her husband’s accident-and although she now depends on this job to generate the income needed to support her small household, Walker quickly understands that she is a dedicated practitioner, that her career gives her immense satisfaction and is probably the single most important element of her life. Find yourself drowning in a sea of trouble, and hard work can become the raft that ends up keeping you afloat. Walker reads it in her eyes, is impressed by how noticeably they have brightened now that Born has mentioned the subject, and suddenly there is a possible opening, a chance to engage her in pertinent dialogue. The truth is that Walker is genuinely interested in what she does. He has read Jakobson and Merleau-Ponty on aphasia and language acquisition, has given serious thought to these matters because of his engagement with words, and therefore he does not feel like a fraud or a conniver when he starts pelting her with questions. At first, Hélène is taken aback by his enthusiasm, but once she realizes that he is in earnest, she begins to talk about articulation disorders in children, her methods of treating the lisping, garble-mouthed, stuttering youngsters who come to her clinic, but no, she doesn’t only work with children, there are the adults as well, the old people, the victims of stroke and various brain injuries, the aphasics, the ones who have lost the power of speech or can’t remember words or jumble words to such an extent that pen becomes paper and tree becomes house . There are several different forms of aphasia, Walker learns, depending on which part of the brain is affected-Broca’s aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia, conduction aphasia, transcortical sensory aphasia, anomic aphasia, and so on-and isn’t it intriguing, Hélène says, smiling for the first time since she entered the restaurant, truly smiling at last, isn’t it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language-the ability to experience the world through symbols-is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn’t it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and the body are one.

He is discovering that the best way to get to know them is to leave himself out of it, to ask questions rather than give answers, to make them talk about themselves. But Walker is not adept at this kind of interpersonal manipulation, and he falls into an uncomfortable silence when Born barges in with some pointedly negative comments about the Israeli army’s refusal to withdraw from Sinai and the West Bank. Walker senses that he is trying to goad him into an argument, but the fact is that he agrees with Born’s stance on this issue, and rather than let him know that, he says nothing, waiting for the harangue to run its course by looking at Cécile’s mouth, which is again tugging downward in response to some secret inner mirth. He could be wrong, but it appears that she finds the intensity of Born’s opinions rather funny. A couple of minutes later, the rant is interrupted when the appetizers are set before them. Seizing his opportunity, Walker breaks the sudden silence by asking Cécile about her study of ancient Greek. Greek wasn’t offered at the high school he went to, he says, and he envies her for having the chance to learn it. He has only two years of college left, and by now it’s probably too late for him to start.

Not really, she says. Once you learn the alphabet, it’s not as hard as it looks.

They talk about Greek literature for a while, and before long Cécile is telling him about her summer project-a crazy, overly ambitious plan that has led to three months of constant frustration and regret. God knows what possessed her to try in the first place, she says, but she got it into her head to take on a book-length poem by the most difficult writer imaginable and translate it into French. When Walker asks who the writer is, she shrugs and says that he hasn’t heard of him, that no one has heard of him, and indeed, when she mentions the poet’s name, Lycophron, who lived around 300 B.C., Walker admits that she is right. The poem is about Cassandra, she goes on, the daughter of Priam, the last king of Troy-poor Cassandra, who had the misfortune to be loved by Apollo. He offered her the gift of prophecy, but only if she agreed to sacrifice her virginity to him in exchange. At first she said yes, then she said no, and the jilted Apollo took his revenge on her by poisoning his gift, making sure that none of Cassandra’s prophecies would ever be believed. Lycophron’s poem is set during the Trojan War, and Cassandra is in prison, already mad, about to be murdered with Agamemnon, spewing forth endless ravings and visions of the future in a language so complex, so crammed with metaphors and allusions, that it is almost unintelligible. It is a poem of shrieks and howls, Cécile tells him, a great poem in her opinion, a wild and utterly modern poem, but so daunting and elusive, so far beyond her powers of comprehension, that after hours and hours of work she has managed to translate only a hundred and fifty lines. If she keeps it up, she says, mouth tugging downward once again, it will take her only ten or twelve years to finish.

In spite of her self-deprecating manner, Walker can’t help admiring the girl’s courage for tackling such a formidable poem, a poem he himself would now like to read, and consequently he asks her if any translations exist in English. She doesn’t know, she says, but she would be happy to find out for him. Walker thanks her and then adds (out of simple curiosity, with no ulterior motive) that he would like to read her version of the opening lines in French. But Cécile demurs. It couldn’t possibly interest you, she says. It’s pure rubbish. At which point Hélène pats her daughter’s hand and tells her not to be so hard on herself. Born then pipes in and addresses Cécile as well: Adam is a translator, too, you know. A poet first, but also a translator of poems. From Provençal, no less. He once gave me a work by my would-be namesake, Bertran de Born. An impressive fellow, old Bertran. He tended to lose his head at times, but a good poet, and Adam did an excellent translation.

Oh? Cécile says, looking at Walker. I wasn’t aware of that.

I don’t know about excellent, he says, but I have done a little translating.

Well, she replies, in that case…

And just like that, with no forewarning, with no devious maneuvers on his part, Walker finds himself arranging to get together with Cécile tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock to have a look at her manuscript. A small victory, perhaps, but quite suddenly he has accomplished everything he set out to do this evening. There will be further contact with the Juins, and Born will be nowhere in sight.