Diego Marani - The Interpreter

‘Not many people understand what I am searching for. Mankind is troubled by the very idea that the earth might have a secret language, and that this language lies hidden within each of our ruptured words, unsettled by the thought that it lives in objects, in animals, within these trees, even in stones, and that the planets speak to each other using it. Mankind refuses to believe it can understand the ancient language of Eden, the one in which the serpent spoke to Adam!’

A gust of wind carried his voice away amidst the rustling of the leaves and the pounding rain. I could no longer hear his words, so I took a few cautious steps towards him as he stood on the gravel of the bank, legs apart, shouting and gesticulating wildly. It was then that I realised that he was no longer talking in French, or not in French alone. Other sounds with which I was unfamiliar were creeping into his speech. I moved a little nearer: now I could understand again, or at least grasp some phrases.

‘You won’t be seeing me again, I promise you. I’ll keep out of your way — forever. But I’d like you to know that your imperviousness to my pleading means that you carry a burden of guilt. By being so obtuse, you are doing violence to your own intelligence. You are refusing to understand: you could see through this darkness, yet you choose to remain blind. Yet you’re complicit in my discovery whether you like it or not, and what you refuse to know will dog you always! All your life you will continue to wonder what I was looking for, and whether I found it. Like me, you know the secret mankind is not yet ready to receive and, like me, you will not be spared. This is the poisonous knowledge I bequeath you! So here they are, the sounds that will torment you from this day forward! Listen! You will hear them in your sleep, they will taint your words, they will pursue you in your loneliness each time the hollow human voices around you become stilled, because these sounds…’

His speech was borne off on another gust of wind. But when the branches stopped creaking and the leaves fell silent in a temporary lull, it was then, with my own eyes and my own ears — I swear to God — that I witnessed the ghastly scene of that man’s metamorphosis, one in which all the awful power of creation was at work. His eyes were raised towards the dismal sky, his mouth agape; drawing his stomach in, he began to hiss, emitting a sound like a liquid whistle, which his palate was trying to restrain but which then sank down into his throat and mingled with a raucous vibration of his vocal cords. Between a series of fitful spasms which caused him to seize up, as though in a fit of retching, the mysterious sound gurgled out from behind his glottis to become a muffled whimper, then rose again like overflowing liquid, then exploded into the hollow of his mouth in meaningless, truncated words, apparently uttered by someone else. A prey to uncontrollable grimaces, he nonetheless seemed to embrace the trauma with which he was bedevilled, as though almost welcoming those violent gulps and hiccups into his racked frame. He was grinding his teeth, his eyes were almost out of their sockets, his lips were stretched into a fearful gape which at times resembled a smile. Animal cries, strident braying, harsh-sounding meaningless words which could belong to no human tongue poured forth, apparently at random. His face too had become transformed, taking on the appearance of a bird, his nose now resembling a beak, his eyes like sightless bubbles of glass; he was waving his arms around in the air like the talons of a bird of prey, and by so doing he seemed to have stirred up the very elements, which now started to whirl around again as though in sympathy. Behind his back, the water was heaving and roiling, as though the sounds he was uttering were striking deep into its dark depths, awakening chill lake monsters from their age-old sleep as they heard his voice from where they lurked in the slime, and rose clumsily to the surface to see who on earth could be calling them.

Aghast at the sight of that fearful vision, I took a step backwards, stumbled through the trees, emerged onto the muddy grass and carried on running until I reached the lighted road.

The summer went by like a fit of fever; the offices emptied out, the corridors now peopled only by the odd dead-eyed caretaker. The endless papers which, until a few days ago, had been whirling around on my desk, suddenly calmed down and became silent. The lake was alive with sailing boats, leaving foaming ripples in their wake. A persistent festive buzz came from its glittering shore, though without ever reaching the city, which lay silent and crushed beneath the sun’s resolute glare. I sought shelter from all this intrusive brightness by burrowing into my solitude, surprised to discover how deep I could dig; I came upon caves of fear and silence where time oozed forth in slow and heavy drops. I cowered there, anxious to emerge yet drawn to their chill depths. By day I wandered through the half-empty city with the excuse of making pointless purchases; I would buy bread which would then harden, forgotten on my desk, fruit which would moulder and rot in the plastic bag. Although I didn’t admit as much, it was Irene whom I was hoping to meet. I would follow every woman who looked remotely like her, catch up with her, already knowing that she was not the person I wanted her to be, walk past her and wander off disconsolate, talking to myself like a mad man.

It was the park that I preferred for my solitary ramblings; I would walk, head bowed, along the lakeside, until the call of a seagull or a hooting ferry roused me from my aimless drifting. I’d sit down wearily on a bench, pondering the route of my bleak return. Each hour of the day, each district, recalled a thousand memories, which flew off like flocks of birds at my approach, leaving foul feathers scattered on the grass, all that remained of what had once been such rich swag. Everything fled from me, but everything also pursued me, doggedly. In the deepest shade of the park I sometimes thought I heard the interpreter’s squawking and braying and, to my alarm, would find that I had ended up at that very place on the lake shore where I had seen him last. I would hurry off, trying to resist the temptation to turn round, and when at last I yielded, all that I saw was the sun’s fitful dazzle on the flower-filled shore and the brightly coloured ice-cream van slithering along the gravelled alleyway with its mournful peal of bells. A breath of fear would ripple through the wet grass, the feeling that something fateful had happened just at that very moment and that I was the only man in the world who was unaware of it. I would be seized by the certainty that something awesome had occurred, but I did not know what; all I felt was the need to remember, to note the light, the colour of the sky, the time, the landscape. So that at least would remain for me.

At night I would lock myself up in the big empty house. The only room I now used was my study; I’d put a camp bed in it, and would lie there for hours, staring up at the sky until the light drained away and darkness reigned at last. I would doze off, briefly, only to be hounded by the start of a nightmare in which Irene’s reproaches would mingle with obscure threats from the interpreter, dragging me from the lukewarm waters of sleep. Since the interpreter had no clearly defined face, it was she who would begin to bark at me, cawing, hissing, staring at me with the eyes of a wild beast, uttering senseless words, like those of a sorceress. I would lie there for hours, drowsing uneasily like a creature beached on scorching sand, racked by fits of exhausted, dry-eyed weeping; only at dawn did I manage to fall asleep for a few hours, to wake up cold and aching, my head still full of the gibberish that had peopled my nightmares, which I repeated to myself mechanically — against my will, it seemed to have become lodged in my tangled memory, to have cemented itself into my mind. On my walks through the park, I would find myself uttering these senseless words out loud, in time to the rhythm of my steps, of my breath, of the music of popular songs played on the radio; they bored themselves insistently into my brain, prolonging night-time anguish into the daylight hours. I even tried putting them side by side, to see if, aligned with one another, they would take on any sense. I broke them down, turned them around, read them backwards, covered whole sheets of paper with them. I went to look them up in foreign dictionaries I’d found in the translation department library.