Free The Interpreter by Diego Marani, Judith Landry Page A

of the moon, I imagined rooms I’d never seen; it’s only now, after two months of knowing you, that I realise you’ve never shown me your house. I even started to think that perhaps you didn’t live there at all, that the card you’d given me wasn’t even yours. I went to look for you at the ‘Etoile’ cinema but they didn’t know anything about you either; at the sight of those dark red seats, my heart missed a beat. I asked the cinema manager to let me into the interpreting booths for a moment; in yours, I thought there was still a ghost of your smell. You’ll say that that’s impossible; it must be because I’ve still got it in my nostrils, and seeing places where I’d been with you just brought it back. I started to cry. The manager beckoned me to go down again, but I couldn’t because I was crying, and when he noticed, he came up and closed the curtain. Please, write to me, tell me where you are, just tell me that you’re still alive, goddammit! You’ve got my address in Zurich, write to me there. I’ll be leaving soon, I can’t bear to stay in this city any more, it’s been poisoned by unbearable memories; even the light of the changing times of day reminds me of you. So at two o’clock I’m in agony because you aren’t meeting me in front of the station, at three because we’re not strolling through the empty Sunday streets, just you and me, cars parked and cats on windowsills; and then again at four, when I can no longer see you but hear your voice in my head, your voice which speaks so many words, all the world’s words, except for those I long to hear. What are you looking for? What ghost are you pursuing, what secret suffering has you on its hook? Or is it you who are in flight? From what, from whom? Are you a murderer who has left gruesome acts behind you? Why don’t you tell me about them? Why have you never talked to me of yourself? It is only now that I realise that it’s not you I am in love with, but the characters in the films that you translated: a different man each Sunday, because that’s all you’ve ever given me of yourself. So now it’s Piotr I’m in love with, perhaps because he was the first, laden with promise, and perhaps because he was the gentlest of them. But Piotr hanged himself, poor bastard! And you’re not here, you never have been, you’ve never existed! In which case, how shall I ever forget you? How can I wipe you out of my mind, you who are the sum of so many absences, the blank mirror in which I seek… you, who are nobody, and myself. And who can rid me of myself?
    I shall love you forever.
    Irene
    Irene, my Irene slave to that madman! Now I understood those restless Sundays, the windy afternoons of that fateful spring when I would watch her preparing eagerly for her cinema matinees. I shouldn’t have let her go alone, least of all to the foreign season. But who could have known, who could have possibly imagined…It was all so unbearable that I felt a sudden desire not to believe it. I might have been able to leave that room, go down into the road and cross the little garden as though I had discovered nothing. But those three letters in their yellow envelopes had put a stop to that; rather, what they did was to trigger off new suffering in me. That man was like a maelstrom, sucking anyone who approached him into his vortex; he had swallowed up Irene, inexorably dragging her away from me and then contaminating me too with his own vile evil.
    I picked up the letters and stuffed them back into their envelopes, thrusting them into my pocket. Outside, the sky was now becoming covered with low, threatening banks of cloud; inside, too, darkness was gathering, the first raindrops pattering on the dirty windowpanes. The lift started up, and a square of light fell on the table, revealing a thick layer of dust disturbed by the wanderings of my hands. I was on the point of leaving when my eye was caught by a piece of folded paper tucked beneath an ugly glass vase