Revenge of the Translator. Brice Matthieussent

and I’m freefalling through an undefined black space, in the grips of a violent vertigo and a complete loss of any sense of direction, between the walls of what I imagine to be a bottomless pit, a bit like the unlucky hero of “A Descent into the Maelström,” the story by Edgar Allan Poe. Then a fading into darkness, a terrifying blackout. An ellipse, a hole in the narration. Then I climb back up inexplicably, with no tether to any ground or gravity, I am weightless, levitating, or else a shell spurting from a cannon pointed to the sky. Soon I reach the summit of my trajectory, where I am immobilized for a moment in the grips of a retching that leaves me breathless, before starting on another freefall, more and more rapid, more and more panicked. Another fading into black, another loss of consciousness. This entire sequence repeats again and again, with no respite, an inexorable swinging motion. From high to low, then from low to high, given over entirely to this metronomic mechanism, whose purpose I do not know. In a certain way, I suffer like the condemned man of that other story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” but unlike him I have no means to change my destiny or save my life.

      For several months of my childhood, I went to sleep every night with the obsessive fear of reliving what I believe today to be the very terror of torture: to know you are given over to an unfamiliar and evil will. But my nocturnal terror was not of a human executioner, merely—which is perhaps worse—of a relentless mechanism, unfamiliar, incomprehensible, absent. An inhuman machinery would launch me toward the black sky, then bring me back down to an unknown depth, again and again.

      This repetitive nightmare reminds me of the Goya painting The Straw Manikin. I’ll describe it briefly. Four smiling, certainly cruel young women each hold a corner of a large square blanket over which hovers a puppet in men’s clothing, larger than a child, smaller than a man. Hard to say whether this dislocated mannequin is flying toward the cloudy sky or falling back into the blanket; he seems to float weightlessly, hands and legs sadly turned toward the earth, head curiously tilted toward his shoulder, like a hung man with a broken neck. Beneath his white face made up with blush descends a long black braid curved in the form of a flaccid penis, isolated, backlit, strikingly positioned in front of the most luminous part of the sky. The four young women’s arms are spread wide, as if to welcome the arrival of the stuffed puppet, and they seem delighted with their game, which recommences endlessly. They amuse themselves with the back and forth of the milquetoast who goes up and falls back down at their mercy, obeying the muscles of their arms. In the back and to the left, a massive square tower with a roof of red tiles is hidden in a haze of greenery. This large painting, it seems, is a cartoon tapestry, but it evokes above all a theater stage, and the décor—intangible sun, abundant foliage, half-hidden tower, stormy clouds—resembles a gigantic painted canvas stretched in front of actors, singers, or dancers. (Terrifying Night)

      *

      * “Doris again, Doris forever … In your name, I hear or, gold, dors, an order to sleep, Ulysses’s trip to the land of the Lotus Eaters, and also his departure and its groundwork—ho! hiss!—the wind that suddenly blows the sails before the boat has left the port to head for the open sea, adventure, the unknown; or else, the inverse, in one direction and then the other, the return to the mother land, reunion with the mother tongue after a long absence, or else the whalers of Pequod shut tightly in their fragile skiff, preparing their harpoons to stop the white monster, drive their banderillas into its milky skin covered with dreadful crustaceans, sprinkled with asterisks, like a negative of the sky. Doris, I turn to you as a ship reaches a port after a long absence, ailing Ulysses or pitiful Pytheas, reaching the end of a desolate wandering over the sea in the middle of land, from a hazardous arrival to a hasty departure. I had given up hope of ever seeing my motherland again, so afraid was I of losing everything in the liquid plains. But in a remarkable role reversal, you are the one who goes back and forth between Paris and New York, assistant to the devious Abel Prote, you the golden light to my translucent eye, my lucky traveling star, my transporter weaving invisible threads between the ancient and the new worlds, spinning her tapestry of love in the sky where I hope one day to see my person outlined in the interlacing of all those nocturnal flights, among the shimmering stars, above the Atlantic swell.”

      I deem David Grey’s romantic temperament compatible with this declaration that I add shamelessly to his diary, which, once again, seems to me lacking in spirit, in lyricism. My timid author is quite the nuisance! (Tender Navigator)

      *

      * David Grey is translating Prote’s novel (N.d.T.), a rather dry title lacking in panache. This N.d.T. stinks of DDT … I will not give my opinion on this novel within a novel. The reader can make his or her own judgment. But I will take advantage of my subordinate position, of my liberty, and of David’s melancholic stroll on the deserted Long Island shore after Doris’s departure (“Air France Flight 875 to Paris-Charles de Gaulle, immediate boarding at gate 34,” announces the robotic female voice) to add this new seaside scene to the text:

      “Beneath a white sky specked with a motionless helicopter, the waves slowly move away from the thin black horizon line, they approach, accelerate, reach the shore, and unfurl there, immediately replaced by other waves that come to crash on the pebble beach endlessly, filling that large strip as my lines succeed each other at the bottom of the page.”

      A bit farther on, I insert:

      “The sand is littered with debris in varying states of decomposition: pieces of colored glass, bits of plastic that are impossible to identify, shells of crabs in the shape of horseshoes, large spiral shells that are rarely intact, whitish drooping jellyfish, as if dead, heaps of brown or beige shredded kelp, flat pebbles, tempting to throw like spinning tops toward the surface of the ocean so that they bounce and ricochet more and more rapidly before sinking abruptly. David Grey goes down toward the part of the beach covered by the low tide. He stops suddenly and kneels down in front of the little hills made up of fine and supple strands of sand intertwined like tiny rigging. In the shallows, the razor clams await the rising tide. David remembers an ingenious strategy for catching them: all you have to do is leave a pinch of salt on the hole beneath the hill and the mollusk, lured by that crystalline asterisk and that suddenly salty water, will wrongly conclude that the tide has already risen, that it should come out of its hiding place to poke its nose above the sand, and then you simply snatch it up. But Grey has no salt on him: the razor clams can wait in peace for the real rise of the tide. In the same way, couldn’t a cheating weight lifter, with a large magnet hidden above him in the rafters … ? (Trickster’s Net)

      *

      * Once Doris is on her plane, David Grey leaves New York to go to Chicago by night train. He reserved a sleeper seat, at the very bottom of a cramped compartment, almost level with the ground. There is little space between his sleeper seat, which is more of a narrow bench, and the one above it, occupied by a corpulent man with a wheezing breath. Exhausted after all those days of work and love spent with Doris, in the grips of the sweet melancholy of idleness and amorous solitude, he immediately falls asleep despite the snores above. He sleeps for an unknown amount of time, then is awakened with a start by the silence which has brusquely replaced the regular hypnotic din of the freight car wheels. His neighbor above has even stopped snoring. David sits up on his narrow sleeper seat, reaches for the metallic bar of the closed window and lifts it halfway up. The train has stopped in the middle of nowhere, there isn’t a single house visible in the white early morning glow. The pale sky remains hidden by the canvas rectangle.

      In a sleepy stupor, the traveler notices the straight and uniform furrows, parallel to the tracks, of an immense field surrounded by the vertical supports of the window. It snowed. The bottom of the furrows are a blinding white, while the crests of earth, black and irregular, separate the immaculate lines, sometimes skinny, sometimes bigger, thus constituting a repetitive contrast, a fluttering like venetian blinds, a rapid hand playing with the horizontal slats. In the distance, a blue-and-white mail truck drives along the straight