The Interpreter (6 page)

Whole days would go by without my saying a word to a soul; I was surprised to learn how long one could live without speaking. I'd say ‘Good morning' to the caretaker in the office, the odd ‘sorry' to someone on the tram, a ‘thank you' in the bar, and it would already be evening. The trees were turning with the first heavy rain, the nights were becoming dark again; less dramatic dawns would reveal a steely sky which sent a fine white dust raining down onto the city, and the lake was puckered with cold wrinkles, which broke up on the shore like the laboured breath of a sick man. Voices rang out again in office corridors and the streets were bright with headlamps of an evening. I started work again, and within the shelter of my room the grip of solitude eased up a little; in there, time could flow over me without harming me. But as soon as I was out again on the street, I felt myself short of breath, each corner like a dagger of anguish planted in my back. I'd try to spin out my journey, to put off the moment when I'd have to turn the key in the lock and be enveloped by the darkness of those empty rooms. I'd wander from one pavement to another, sometimes suddenly changing direction to escape my goal, and I had the feeling that the people around me noticed my odd behaviour and looked at me suspiciously, as though I were a beggar.

It happened for the first time on a Saturday afternoon, and in the moments that followed I truly felt that each man and his destiny are two sworn enemies whom only death will part; only one of the two can go on living, the other must succumb. The fight is not only desperate, it is also unequal; it may go on for years, or draw to a lightning close. Yet there are men who manage to floor their mortal double and clear the way for their own existence. I am not one of them: I died that day, and the person who is writing this is a mere ghost. I'd gone into a baker's to buy my usual loaf of bread, but instead of the words I had intended to produce, what came out of my mouth was incomprehensible blather. At first I thought I was just out of practice, that my long periods of silence had weakened my powers of conversation; in the office I'd already noticed my voice becoming hoarse after just a few moments dictating to my secretary. So I simply gave the puzzled shopgirl an embarrassed look and tried repeating my request. In my efforts to speak clearly, I felt my throat knotting up; between the words I was so clumsily pronouncing, I gave out a long rasping sound like that of a whimpering dog. Eyes wide with terror, I backed off towards the door and left the shop, making brusque gestures of refusal to the alarm-stricken shopgirl, who was still firmly proffering me my loaf of bread. I ran off like a murderer, my throat paralysed by fear, turning around every so often to look back at the by now distant baker's to check that no one was coming after me, that people were not stopping to point at me as I passed. When I got home, I rushed up, panting, to the bathroom mirror: what I saw reflected before me was not my usual gaunt face, but one with the glassy eyes of a fish, a foam-flecked mouth like the jaws of a wild beast, and the rough and scaly skin of a reptile – a constant succession of metamorphosing animals, not one of them containing anything of my original self. I drew what breath I could and bared my teeth to pronounce my name: ‘Felix Bellamy! I'm Felix Bellamy, born in Geneva on June 13th 1950!' I shrieked at the top of my voice, and only then did I burst into tears. Terrible days followed: I no longer dared to speak. In the office I pretended to have lost my voice, I addressed my secretary in monosyllables, or using words I'd cautiously tried out beforehand, outside the door. At home in the evenings I'd read out loud from some work document, to see how serious the problem was – I could feel it spreading ominously within me. Inevitably it would recur: just when I felt the warm flow of words running evenly and freely from my throat, suddenly they would crumble into contorted syllables, become guttural stuttering sounds, then whistles. I tried to resist this transformation with all my might, twisting my neck, raising my chin, grinding my teeth, thrusting my tongue vainly backwards to free it from the knot which was throttling it at its root. But in the end all that remained of my voice was a raucous shout, gurgling like vomit from some unknown breach in my glottis. It all happened almost without my noticing, as though some other being had taken temporary possession of my mouth to use it as its own – some unknown and monstrous being which had made its way into my body and was struggling laboriously to come out into the world.

It didn't take me long to realise what had happened. I was ill, I could no longer hide the fact. The illness that had found its home within me was a parasite, a sort of fungus, an unthinking worm, made up of merciless cells which would devour me if I did not have some recourse to action. But was it not already too late? After much hesitation, remembering the psychiatric report attached to his medical notes, I decided to go to the archives and look for the file on the interpreter. I wanted to track down the specialist who had diagnosed his illness and put myself in his hands – before it was too late, for me as well. On the last page of the file I found the name and address of Dr Herbert Barnung, a German expert who had done years of research into language disorders.

I left for Munich one muggy day in late summer. The airport was extremely quiet; the girls at the cash desks in the duty-free shops were twirling around on their stools, underemployed, shoes off, scratching one heel with the big toe of the other foot, and inspecting their nails. In the corridors leading to the flight decks, the only sound was the customs men's radios crackling behind the plate glass of their cabins. Once I'd boarded the plane, the mood seemed to be one of intense expectation: peering at the faces of the other passengers, absorbed in their newspapers, I had the impression that we were all going to see Dr Barnung. His consulting room turned out to be in the new part of the city, at the edge of extensive woods and lawns dotted with flowerbeds. What I particularly remember of that warm and sunny afternoon is the outline of a cat crouching on the sill behind the tinted glass of a window giving onto the garden, the long shadows cast on the wall by the seats in the waiting room, the old magazines on the table and Dr Barnung himself, thin and pale in his white gown, coming towards me and holding out his hand, yet at the same time somewhat forbidding, with the spare look of a military man used to a frugal life style. He had hard features, prominent cheekbones, a high, freckled forehead; behind his clear blue eyes I sensed the shadow of distant trouble, the force of an iron will. His consulting room had heavy wooden panelling and dark, heavy furnishings; on the walls, in ornamental metal frames, were large prints of birds of prey. Clasping his long white hands together and rubbing them along the table, he listened attentively to my tale of woe. When I embarked on the unlikely story of the interpreter and his secret language, contrary to my expectations, he neither interrupted me nor seemed to become impatient. He read carefully through the pages on which I had written out the meaningless words that punctuated my nightmares, pausing for thought, knitting his thick reddish eyebrows; at times he would glance up from his reading and scan my face with an impassive look. I was not to have long to describe my problems, however, because I soon found myself beginning to stammer out my gibberish in front of him as well; my tongue became glued to my palate, and when at last I managed to loosen it from the grip of the cramp that had mysteriously assailed it, I found my throat seizing up, driving out the air I was vainly drawing in from my lungs in my efforts to articulate my words, yet turning them into nothing more than warbling babble. Alarmed, Dr Barnung put a finger to his lips, then appeared to smile, perhaps the smug smile of a professional who has identified the problem. He wrote some notes in minuscule handwriting, glancing up occasionally in fascination to observe the spasmodic contractions of my face as he did so. But when at last he spoke, his expression was impenetrable and his voice grave.

‘Do you have difficulty in focusing on what you're looking at? Do you sometimes suddenly find yourself right up against things which seconds before had seemed far away?'

‘I don't know. But my vision does cloud over, and I do have long periods of distraction which I can't then reconstruct.'

‘What is your mother tongue?'

‘French.'

‘Are other languages spoken in your family?'

‘My paternal grandparents were German, but I never knew them.'

‘Did your father speak German with you?'

‘Not often. He never taught it to me. He used German mainly when it was something serious, or to tell me off. I understood it, but I couldn't speak it.'

‘Did you answer your father back when he scolded you in German?'

‘No. I never answered back. Indeed, it was to let me know that I mustn't answer back that he spoke to me in German.'

‘Did your mother speak any language apart from French?'

‘She too could understand German, but she didn't speak it.'

‘Not even with your father?'

‘No.'

Dr Barnung nodded, pursed his lips and pushed away the paper with his tiny writing. Clasping his hands again, he put his elbows on the table.

‘Mr Bellamy, in all probability, what you are suffering from is a serious linguistic disassociation. We'll need to have other sessions to sort the matter completely, possibly using hypnosis, but it seems clear to me that a split between French and German has opened up in your unconscious: between the language you habitually spoke, and the one associated with serious occasions, and no answering back. This dichotomy has caused a disturbance which you have hitherto managed to keep under control, but, for some unknown reason, something has occurred which has upset your delicate psychic balance. Your mind can no longer tolerate this disconnection and is expressing its suffering by emitting incoherent sounds; it must have sensed that the root of the problem lies in your relationship with your parents. At one time such psychoses could only be tackled with the brutal chemistry of psychiatry, or with the slow and complex processes of psychoanalysis. In our clinic, we have developed forms of therapy which are less disruptive and more decisive, thanks to which you will not have to delve into your unconscious in search of painful buried memories. All that you will need to do to cure your disease is to monitor the tracks which French and German have traced in your mind, widening them where they have become constricted and stemming them in the places where they overflow. With the help of the sophisticated technique of linguistic hypnosis we use in this institute, you have excellent chances of recovery. Sometimes just a few weeks' therapy is enough to relieve the symptoms, but for a lasting recovery more time is needed. You will have to be with us for some time, and submit yourself to our cure willingly and constructively if you truly want to get better.'

I glanced up at the doctor incredulously. For a moment I thought that I had fallen victim to an elaborate hoax. Perhaps our conversation had been a sort of dress rehearsal to which he had to subject unknown patients who turned up in his clinic in order to distinguish mythomaniacs from those who were really ill. I smiled awkwardly, to show him that I had seen through his ruse and that we could now proceed to the real interview. But that chill stare, the marble coldness of that angular body, which seemed to spread to every object in the room, made me realise that Dr Barnung was not joking, that he had never joked in his whole life, that for him every form of existence was a kind of madness to be cured. I would have liked to laugh in his face, to have accused him of being a charlatan and run out into the sunlight, away from that airless room. But deep down I felt that the doctor was right, that there was indeed something hanging open and unstitched within me; weakened by that invisible haemorrhage, my mind was becoming dimmer, spinning out of my control, slowly dissolving, making me easy prey to the other beings who now lived within me.

‘And what do your cures consist of?' I asked meekly, a large knot forming in my chest.

‘Of language courses, Mr Bellamy. You see, for us each language has its own therapeutic value; we make the most of all its virtues. For curing the most extreme pathologies, we do not flinch from recourse to using the rarest and most difficult of all. Of course, the point of departure is always the patient's mother tongue. Something that might be of benefit to a Chinese person might do you irrevocable psychic harm but have no effect at all upon a speaker of Bantu. So here in this clinic the patients are rigorously subdivided into separate linguistic departments. There can be nothing more harmful, at this stage in the cure, than exposing a patient to a language to which he is unsuited.'

‘And what is the language for me?'

‘The right language is determined by the pathology, but it may change as the cure proceeds, depending on the degree and speed of the recovery. In your case, what I'd suggest first is an intensive course of Romanian. You see, French and German are similar in the way they view reality, but in essence they are profoundly different. Latin and Germanic languages have something in common; they may influence one another and, with time, even understand each other, but they cannot mix. Romanian on the other hand is a happy synthesis between Slav and Latin; in Romanian, all that is rational about Rome, mingled with Mediterranean ebullience, becomes fused with irrational Slav passion and melts into the yearning melancholy of the steppe. Association with this balanced medley of language and spirit will do you good; it will help to heal the wound you currently feel throbbing in your mind. The healing process will take place unconsciously. By sinking deep into the meanders of your brain, the learning of this new language will make good the damage. Alongside the Romanian cure, however, I'd also suggest protracted German therapy, partly because for us German is a bit like aspirin, it's good for everything: it clarifies thought processes, stiffens resolve and lays feelings bare. In your case, it is also one of the branches of your mind which you must rediscover and learn to live with: there is an atrophied residue of German within you which is clinging on to life, but which might also end up by obstructing your psychic development. I feel I must warn you that complications could arise. Disturbed by a sudden feeling of estrangement, at first your ego might take refuge in French and refuse to emerge from it, and then shock therapy would be required. We would have to subject you to a deeply alienating and, how can I put it, exotic linguistic soaking, with some sessions of Tungusic and Inuit to lure your ego out and oblige it to face up to the trauma it is suffering. Occasionally we might even have to have recourse to dead languages: the primitive structure of languages such as Matagalpa and Tuscarora can sometimes jolt the worn mechanisms of modern languages back into action, affording the mind the possibility of a fresh start. Therapeutically speaking, such steps are the equivalent of electric shock treatment. Don't worry, though, we resort to such methods only in extreme cases.'