The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (24 page)

If I could only get started, get my foot in the door. Because I knew, from spending years in the publishing world, that it’s easier to write badly
after
you’ve made a name for yourself. I didn’t want to demoralize myself by writing a novel under my own name and then having it rejected. Writers, along with other artists, go through that humiliation all the time. But I didn’t want to bother, if that was to be the outcome. I only wanted the good parts: Fame, money, adulation.

And so, innocently, and in the spirit of good fun, I came up one day with the idea of pretending to translate the work of a Latin American woman writer who did not exist.

I chose that continent because I know the literary landscape of South America better than I know that of Spain. The literary landscape I know best is that of Uruguay, but for that reason alone I knew I couldn’t make my author Uruguayan. For society outside Montevideo is composed mainly of cattle ranchers, and society inside Montevideo is composed entirely of people who know each other. I couldn’t make my author someone in exile either, because those writers are even more visible, and Luisa Montiflores, the brilliant egomaniac whose work I had translated for years, knew them all.

So I decided my novelist,
mi novelista
, must come straight from the teeming urban jungle of Buenos Aires. I hadn’t been to the capital of Argentina in some time, but that didn’t worry me as I didn’t actually plan to set my novel in any place as recognizable as Buenos Aires. I’d read my Italo Calvino and Borges. I’d translated my Luisa Montiflores. I too could create an imaginary city bearing only a tangential relationship to one described in a guidebook.

I called my novelist Elvira Montalban, and one rainy evening in London (where finances had forced me once again to depend on the hospitality of Nicola Gibbons. If you could call a woman hospitable who no longer allowed dairy products in her refrigerator and who practiced the bassoon day and night), I set to work.

My tone, from the beginning, was an intriguing combination of magic realism and some science fiction stories I’d read as an adolescent in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There were no aliens and no spaceships, but the time was the future and the landscape, though not post-nuclear, had been altered through climatic change. A soft blanket of snow lay over everything that had once been equatorial and, in the far north, the glaciers had begun again their slow advance.

Social relationships, too, had undergone a change (unaccounted-for, but that’s what’s useful about speculative fiction). There was no gender, for instance, and no hierarchy. This was less Utopian on my part than the simple desire to see what was left, to see what still divided people. My society seemed to divide between those who were naturally melancholic, which was the preferred state, and those whose cheerful, positive temperaments had to be toned down and reconfigured. Through seminars on the history of sadness, through forced incarcerations in the melancholic institutions, and in some desperate cases, through constant medication or genetic alteration. The title of the book was, in its English translation,
The Academy of Melancholy
, and it contained the intertwined stories of a group of young people and their professors at one of the great schools for sadness in the country.

When I was finished with the first two chapters, I sent them to an editor at the small, rather snooty London house of Farquharson and Pendergast. I could have tried the larger house that published all Gloria de los Angeles’s bestsellers, where my friend Simon was an editor. But I was still a bit nervous. I feared that Simon would see through me. Farquharson and Pendergast were very literary, very intellectual, and most important, very well-off.

Jane Farquharson rang only a few days later. She told me she found the “atmosphere” of
The Academy of Melancholy
, the novel I had supposedly translated, rather promising and she asked to see more. She was only critical of the actual translation, which, she said kindly, still read a little like the original Spanish. She wanted Pendergast to take a look, and perhaps another consultant who could read the original and compare them.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” I said, as crisply as I could.

“Why not? It’s been published in Argentina, hasn’t it? Or Spain?”

“Not yet.”

“Then you must have her manuscript.”

“She’s a very mistrustful person,” I invented. “Actually, completely paranoid. She’s so afraid of someone stealing her ideas that she only has the one manuscript. She won’t let it out of her sight. I have to sit in her study to translate it. She watches me like a hawk.”

There was a pause while Jane took this in, but the secrecy seemed to excite her. I sensed this in her voice when she said, “But where does she live? Here in London?”

“Of course not,” I said. “She’s in…”

“Buenos Aires?”

“No, no,” I paused desperately. “She’s in…Iceland. Iceland,” I repeated more firmly. “That’s where all the snow comes in.”

“Iceland? How did she get to Iceland? What’s she doing there?”

“She’s in exile. She’s underground. She’s incognito. She’s…I don’t know much more than you do,” I admitted. “I told you, she’s paranoid.”

“But you
have
met her?” Jane’s voice begged for reassurance.

“Of course. Someone passed her name on to me, and I followed it up. Knocked on her door in Reykjavík and persuaded her to let me in. She left Argentina years ago because of the military. Married an Icelandic man, changed her name. Montalban is a pen name, of course.”

“I thought you didn’t know anything about her.”

“These are the barest facts! I don’t know anything important. It’s a miracle I even got her to show me her work.”

“Well…”

“If you’re not interested, that’s fine. I usually work with Simon Gull-Smyth at Penguin. I thought I’d try you first because of your reputation for literary discoveries, but…”

She wanted badly to believe me, and so she did. With Pendergast’s agreement we soon had two contracts, one for me and one for Elvira Montalban, aka Elvira Antoniosdóttir. The delivery date for the translation was set for March 1, so it could make a fall publication and I received a gratifyingly large advance, the majority of which I promised to pass on to Elvira when I saw her.

“You’ll be going to Iceland of course,” said Jane Farquharson. “Do give me your address and so on there, so we can stay in touch.”

And here I had thought that I was going to be spending the first part of the year in my cozy attic room in Nicola’s house. I had already spent some of the advance on buying a comfortable new chair and an elegant desk that I’d been admiring for some time in an antique shop.

“You’re going where?” Nicola demanded when I came home that day and began pulling out suitcases in a fit of irritation.

“Bloody Iceland!”

“But Cassandra, it’s January.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

I’d been to Iceland once, some years ago, in the summer, and it hadn’t been too warm and cheerful then either. I called my one acquaintance in Reykjavík, Birgit Birgitsdóttir, the volcano expert, and found that she was just heading off for an island in the South Pacific, where something was rumored to be about to blow,
rumor
being the operative word for getting her out of Iceland during the darkest time of the year.

Birgit was happy to lend me her flat for a month or so, and didn’t ask many questions. My flurried explanation about needing complete and utter solitude to finish a project may not have sounded too convincing, but my tone of desperation did.

“I’m just happy you caught me before my flight to Sydney,” she said. “Please make yourself at home. There is plenty of whale meat in the freezer.”

It was a dark January day when I closed the door on my cozy room, took the tube to Heathrow, and boarded a flight to Reykjavík.

The interior of Iceland is closed to traffic and most travel in winter. What’s left, what’s open, is the perimeter of the island, which may be imagined as the white rim of frost around a frozen daiquiri. Iceland is as large as England, but the population is only 250,000, and more than half of those people live in Reykjavík, which tends to give the city a huddled feeling.

If I had to be in Iceland in January, I was glad enough to be huddled. I had no desire to travel to the interior.

Of course I went through my advance from Farquharson and Pendergast very quickly. Iceland is the most expensive place in Scandinavia, which is not known for its budget travel. The only cheap thing in Reykjavík is the hot water, which comes from geothermal energy. There is so much hot water, in fact, that when you turn on the tap, you have to wait for the water to get cold.

What did I spend money on? I’m not really sure. I had Birgit Birgitsdóttir’s little flat and a whole load of whale meat in the freezer, and hot water whenever I felt like it. Still, it cost me far more to stay in Reykjavík for a month working on my supposed translation than it would have cost me to live in London for six months while pretending to be in Reykjavík.

The idea of making the book about melancholy was a good one, for the long northern nights and the extreme cold acted to give my book a strong quality of gloom that it had not possessed when I had blithely begun it back in London the previous fall. At that point, melancholy had been more a literary
concept
than a state of mind, or actual climatic condition.

In reality, the act of showing two chapters to Jane Farquharson had been an act of bravado. As a translator I’d been accustomed to working with a text, in either manuscript or book form. Now every morning that January in Reykjavík I woke up to a blank page and wondered how to fill it.

I had models certainly, especially the two women writers from South America I’d been translating for years. I could pretend I was the famous magic realist Gloria de los Angeles, whose erotic scenes and little dramas of arrivals and departures often substituted for any real narrative development. I also had the Uruguayan Luisa Montiflores as an example. Her imagination was metaphoric, not anecdotal. Images piled on images. Similes begetting similes. Irony, puns, repetitions, and contradictions. Asides to the reader. Asides to herself. Connections that twisted through the text like colored wires in a circuit board. Her stories looked a jumble until you began to unpick the blue wires from the red. Many of her sentences had cost me an hour or two to rewrite.

But that’s what I had always loved about translation: to touch words and tangle with them. To get closer and closer to what I felt was the meaning. I was sensitive to writers’ styles. I had an ability to read the mood of a text and to reproduce it. I was able to write, to
mimic
many styles, from academic and elevated to slangy and streetwise. I could pick up the
feeling
of a style. The meaning I struggled over as I translated had nothing to do with the other half of the writer’s art, with shaping or transforming reality. My struggle with meaning was definitional, atmospheric. The meaning had to do with words. It never had to do with my life, my thoughts, my imagination.

Thus, when I began to supposedly translate, which meant to actually write
The Academy of Melancholy
, it was impossible for me to imagine the stories coming out of my life. They could only come out of my imagination. They could only come if I imagined myself to be Elvira Montalban writing her stories in Spanish.

Each morning I would take my cup of very black coffee to the table by the window overlooking a concrete modern apartment building, and I would begin to write in Spanish. Occasionally I would get up, muttering in Spanish, and walk around the room, gesturing and acting out emotions. I wrote by hand, in blue ink on white paper. I pulled my hair back in a bun and wore a dressing gown with shabby silk pajamas underneath. I did this until around noon.

Then I took a long, bewildered walk in the dim, street-lighted, often snowy city of Reykjavík, never quite knowing where I would end up. Sometimes I found myself walking around and around the Torn, the frozen lake in the center. Sometimes I wandered into the Museum of Natural History. I went up and down the pedestrian street looking at Icelandic sweaters. Sometimes I discovered new neighborhoods, a hilly road of bright red and yellow wooden houses. I pretended—or truly felt—that I had been dropped into this winter dark city by accident. I either pretended or saw that the faces around me were blank with misery, colorless and bleak. Onto them I projected a regimented sadness.

Sometimes I stopped for coffee or at a restaurant for a midday meal of potatoes and fish. Sometimes I bought cheese and bread to bring home. When people spoke to me in Icelandic, I sometimes answered in Spanish, though we could have easily spoken English. I purposefully learned little of the language there, and yet the sound of it, ancient and melodic, with occasional sighs and many pauses, filtered in through the two other languages I was working with daily, and added something to the rhythm of what I was writing. I knew that Icelandic, still spoken and written as it was during the time of the medieval sagas, kept itself pure by limiting the number of loan words and taking old Icelandic words and putting them together in some new way.

Thus computer had become, in Icelandic, “numbers-prophetess.”

At two or three, when the light was already fading from the sky, turning the snowy streets a heartbreaking gray-blue, I would begin work again, this time in jeans and a sweater, with my frizzy hair every which way, a plate of sandwiches nearby, and my laptop computer screen the same dull blue as the snow.

I looked at what I had written with my translator’s eye and understood what Elvira had meant to say, if only she could express herself better, if only she had the wealth of the English language at her disposal. I rearranged her syntax and hunted down the meaning of her sentences. I lengthened them and broke them up. I never changed a word she wrote, and yet I changed everything. I worked long into the evening, and lived in her world and shared her bed, and woke up and began the whole process again.

I had no friends, nor did I make any. (And I haven’t heard from Birgit Birgitsdóttir since, though I did leave her plenty of whale meat.) My social life was Elvira, and sometimes I chatted with her in Spanish. Once a neighbor who had a condominium in Torremolinos asked me whom I was talking Spanish with in Birgit’s flat.