A Heart So White (7 page)

My grandmother, I remember, used to laugh when she told me that macabre tale to which, now that I'm an adult, I may perhaps have added some even more macabre detail (I don't think she said anything about blood or how long the night was); she'd laugh that rather girlish laugh of hers (perhaps the laughter of her ten-year-old — possibly even younger — self, her resolutely Cuban laughter) and fan herself, making light of the story and ensuring that I and my ten-year-old - possibly even younger - self would make light of it too, or maybe any fear the tale could arouse was a uniquely female fear, a fear proper to daughters and mothers and wives and mothers-in-law and grandmothers and nannies, a fear that belonged in the same category as the instinctive singing of women throughout the day and at dead of night, in Madrid and in Havana and everywhere, the song in which boys also share only to forget it once they cease to be boys. I'd forgotten it too, but not entirely, for you can only be said truly to have forgotten something if you can't even remember it when someone requires you to. I hadn't thought of that song for years but Miriam's resigned, abstracted voice didn't need to insist or require in order for it to surface in my memory on my honeymoon with my wife Luisa, who was lying in bed ill and, on that night of mellow moonlight, was seeing the world from her pillow or was perhaps not ready to see it at all.

I returned to her side and stroked her hair and the back of her neck, which were again sticky with sweat, she had her face turned towards the wardrobe, her forehead perhaps, as before, crossed by fine hairs, like false, premonitory lines. I sat down at her right side and lit a cigarette, the end glowed in the mirror, I didn't want to look at myself. Her breathing was not that of someone asleep and I whispered in her ear:

"You'll feel better tomorrow, my love. Go to sleep now."

I sat on our bed on the sheet and smoked for a while, hearing nothing farther from the room next door: Miriam's singing had been both the prelude to sleep and an expression of tiredness. It was too hot, I'd had no supper, I wasn't sleepy, I wasn't even tired, I didn't sing or put out the light. Luisa was awake but not talking to me, she didn't even respond to my good wishes, as if she were angry with me because of Guillermo, I thought, or because of Miriam, and didn't want to show it, best let it dissolve into the sleep that refused to come. I thought I heard Guillermo close the balcony doors, but I was no longer leaning on my balcony and I didn't go over there to check. I tapped the ash on my cigarette too hard, misjudged my aim, and it fell on to the sheet, and before picking it up with my fingers and putting it in the ashtray where it would burn itself out without burning anything else, I watched as it began to make a hole fringed with red on the sheet. I think I let it grow for longer than I should have, I watched it for some seconds, watched how the circle grew and widened, a stain that was at once black and fiery, consuming the sheet.

I'D MET LUISA, through my work, almost a year before, in a way that verged simultaneously on the comic and the solemn. As I've mentioned before, we both work mainly as translators or interpreters (in order to make a living); although I work more than she does, at least on a more regular basis, which in no way implies that I'm more competent at my job, she is, or was judged to be so on the occasion of our first meeting, or perhaps she was merely judged to be generally more reliable.

Luckily we don't just work at the sessions and meetings held by international organizations. Although that does give one the incomparable luxury of having to work for only six months of the year (two months in London, Geneva, Rome, New York or Vienna or even Brussels and then two months at home, before returning for a further stint of two months or so in the same places), the task of the translator or interpreter of speeches and reports is boring in the extreme, both because of the identical and fundamentally incomprehensible jargon universally used by all parliamentarians, delegates, ministers, politicians, deputies, ambassadors, experts and representatives of all kinds from every nation in the world, and because of the unvaryingly turgid nature of all their speeches, appeals, protests, harangues and reports. People who have never done this kind of work might think it must be fun or, at the very least, interesting and varied, or more than that, they might even think that in a sense one is at the heart of world decisions with firsthand access to highly detailed and important information about every aspect of the lives of different races, political information, urban and agricultural information, information about armaments, cattle-raising, ecclesiastical matters, physical, linguistic, military and Olympic information, information about police matters and tourism, chemistry and propaganda, sex and television and viruses, sports and banking and cars, hydraulics and war studies and ecology and local customs. It's true that, during my working life, I've translated speeches and texts by all kinds of people on the most unexpected subjects (at the start of my career I was chosen to utter the posthumous words of Archbishop Makarios, just to name one unusual example), and I've proved myself capable of repeating in my own language, or in any of the other languages I understand and speak, long diatribes on such absorbing subjects as the different types of irrigation in Sumatra or minorities in Swaziland and Burkina (formerly Burkina-Faso, capital city: Ouagadougou), who, like everyone else, are having a bad time of it; I've reproduced complicated justifications for providing children with sex education in the Venetian dialect, or the embarrassment of so doing; on the feasibility of continuing to finance the lethal and expensive weapons made by the South African factory Armscor, since, in theory, they can't be exported; on the possibilities of building a replica of the Kremlin in Burundi or Malawi, I think it was (capital cities: Bujumbura and Zomba); on the need to split off from the Spanish peninsula the whole of the east coast (including Murcia) thus making it an island and avoiding the annual torrential rains and floods that are such a burden on the national budget; on a disease attacking marble in Parma, the spread of AIDS in the islands of Tristan da Cunha, the infrastructure of football in the Arab Emirates, low morale in the Bulgarian navy and, as happened a few years ago in Londonderry by order of a mayor who ended up being sacked, a strange ban on burying the dead, who instead were piled up in a stinking heap on a bit of waste ground. All this and more have I religiously translated and transmitted and repeated, exactly as spoken by others, by experts and scientists and luminaries and wise men from every discipline and from the most distant countries, unusual people, exotic people, erudite and eminent people, Nobel prizewinners and professors from Oxford and Harvard who would submit reports on the most surprising topics at the request of their governments or by representatives of their governments or by delegates or even by the deputies of those representatives.

The truth is that the translations are the only fully functioning element in these organizations, which are, in fact, gripped by a veritable translatorial fever, somewhat morbid and unhealthy, for every word pronounced (in session or assembly) and every scrap of paper sent, whatever the subject, whoever it is, in principle, addressed to or whatever its objective (even if it's highly confidential), is immediately translated into several languages, just in case. When we're working, we translators and interpreters do nothing but translate and interpret, indiscriminately and almost without a break, for the most part without anyone knowing why something is being translated or for whom it's being interpreted, more often than not, if it's a written text, it's purely for the files and, if it's a speech, for the few odds and sods who don't understand the second language we're translating into anyway. Some idiot has only to fire off some idiotic remark to one of these organizations for it to be instantly translated into all six official languages, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. Everything gets turned into French and into Arabic, into Chinese and Russian, be it the foolish thoughts of some enthusiast on the sidelines or some other idiot's bright idea. Even if nothing is ever done about them, they get translated. I've often had passed to me for translation invoices that merely needed paying. I'm convinced those invoices will be kept in a file somewhere until the end of time, translated, at the very least, into French and Chinese, Spanish and Arabic, English and Russian. Once I got an urgent phone call in my booth asking me to translate an (unwritten) speech about to be given by a politician who, as I myself knew from the headlines splashed across the front pages of the papers two days before, had been killed in his own country during a coup d'état that had successfully achieved its goal of overthrowing him.

The greatest sources of tension in these international fora are not the fierce discussions between delegates and representatives on the verge of declaring war, but the occasions when, for some reason, there's no translator available to translate or, and this is not an uncommon occurrence, when the translator collapses in the middle of some report for physical or psychological reasons. You have to have a cool head in this job, not so much because of the difficulties of understanding and transmitting what is said as it is said (which is difficult enough) but because of the pressure we're under from politicians and experts, who get upset and even angry if they think there's a chance that something they say might not be translated into one of those six celebrated languages. They watch us all the time, as do our immediate but remote bosses (civil servants all of them), to make sure that we're always at our posts converting everything, omitting not a single word, into the other languages even though almost no one understands them. The one thing delegates and representatives really care about is being translated and interpreted, not having their speeches and reports approved of and applauded or having their proposals taken seriously or implemented, something which almost never happens (no approval, no applause, no being taken seriously, no implementation). At a meeting of the Commonwealth countries that took place in Edinburgh, at which, therefore, all the conference members spoke English, an Australian speaker called Flaxman was outraged when he saw that the interpreters' booths were empty and that not one of his colleagues was listening to him through the headphones provided, but were, instead, sitting in their plump seats listening to him direct through the microphone. He demanded that his words be translated and when reminded that there was no need, he frowned, uttered a foul oath and began to exaggerate his already thick Australian accent to the point where it became unintelligible to members of other countries and even to certain members of his own, who all started complaining and immediately fell victim to the reflex action of the hardened congress member who reaches for the headphones the moment anyone utters anything he can't understand. On finding that, contrary to custom, nothing issued forth from those headphones (not the slightest sound, clear or confused), they grew even more vociferous in their protests, and Flaxman threatened to go in person to one of the cabins and act as his own interpreter. He was already halfway down the aisle when someone intervened and an Australian interpreter was swiftly found to occupy the cabin and to turn into standard English the words his compatriot, a real "larrikin" to use the term he himself would have employed, was proclaiming from the platform in his incomprehensible accent typical of the inner city areas and docklands of Melbourne, Adelaide or Sydney. When he saw that a translator was now at his post duly mirroring the ideas contained in his speech, representative Flaxman immediately calmed down and, without his colleagues even noticing, since by then they'd all decided to listen to him indirectly through their headphones, through which everything sounds somehow both much more hesitant and much more important, resumed his normal, neutral, more or less correct diction. This was the culmination of the translatorial fever that pervades and dominates international fora, a translation from English into English, not entirely accurate either it would seem, since the rebellious Australian congress member spoke too fast for the inexperienced Australian interpreter to be able to repeat it all at the same speed, omitting nothing.

It's odd how, deep down, all assembly members have more confidence in what they hear through their headphones, that is, through the interpreters, than in what they hear (the same thing only more coherently expressed) directly from the speaker, even if they're perfectly capable of understanding the speaker's own language. It's odd because, in fact, no one can be sure that what the translator translates from his isolated cabin is correct or true and I need hardly say that, on many occasions, it's neither one nor the other, due to ignorance, laziness, distraction or malice on the part of the interpreter doing the interpreting, or a bad hangover. That's the accusation levelled at them by translators (that is, translators of written texts): whilst every invoice and every scrap of nonsense laboured over by the translators in their gloomy offices is relentlessly exposed to malicious revisions, and every error detected, denounced or even fined, no one bothers to check the words that the interpreters launch unthinkingly into the air from their cabins. Interpreters hate translators and translators hate interpreters (just as simultaneous translators hate consecutive translators and consecutive translators hate simultaneous translators) and, having worked as both translator and interpreter (though now I work solely as an interpreter, the advantages outweigh the fact that it leaves you utterly drained and affects your psyche), I'm familiar with the feelings associated with both jobs. Interpreters think of themselves as being some kind of demigod or demidiva simply because they're on view to politicians and representatives and deputy delegates, who live only for them, or rather for their presence and the work they do. There's no denying that they are on view to the world's leaders, which is why they're always so impeccably turned out, dressed up to the nines, and it's not uncommon to glimpse them through the glass walls of their booths applying lipstick, combing their hair, adjusting the knot of a tie, plucking out hairs with tweezers, brushing off specks of dust from their suit or trimming their sideburns (they always have a vanity mirror to hand). This, of course, creates unease and rancour amongst the translators of written texts, hidden away in their squalid, shared offices, but also a sense of responsibility that makes them feel infinitely more serious and competent than the vain interpreters with their nice little individual booths, transparent, soundproof and even perfumed in some cases (favouritism is not unknown). Everyone despises and detests everyone else, but we all have one thing in common, which is that not one of us knows a thing about any of the fascinating topics I mentioned earlier. Despite the fact that I translated all the speeches and texts I spoke of before, I can barely remember a single word, not that I ever did and not because there's a limit to how much information the memory can retain, but because, even at the moment I was translating I could remember nothing, that is, even then I had no idea what the speaker was saying nor what I said subsequently or, as one imagines happens, simultaneously. He or she said it and I said or repeated it, but in a mechanical way that has nothing whatsoever to do with intellection (more than that, the two activities are completely at odds), for you can only repeat more or less accurately what you hear if you neither understand nor assimilate any of it (especially if you're receiving and transmitting without pause) and the same thing happens with written texts of this type, which have no literary merit whatsoever and which you never get the chance to correct or ponder over or go back to. So all the valuable information to which people might imagine we translators and interpreters working in international organizations are privy, in fact, escapes us completely, from beginning to end, from top to bottom, we haven't a clue about what's brewing or being plotted and planned in the world, not the slightest glimmer. And even if, sometimes, in our rest periods, we stay behind to listen to the great men without translating them, the identical terminology used by all of them is utterly incomprehensible to anyone in his or her right mind, so that if occasionally, for some inexplicable reason, we do manage to retain a few phrases, the fact is that we then deliberately forget them as quickly as possible, because keeping that inhuman jargon in your head for any longer than the time it takes to translate it into the second language or second jargon is an unnecessary torment, positively harmful to our battered equilibrium.