Free The Interpreter by Diego Marani, Judith Landry Page B

placed in the centre of the table. In the midst of such chaos, the table was the only surface which had been left unencumbered – except for that vase, with that bit of crumpled paper. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a list, written in capitals, with the names of various far distant, scattered cities:
    Vancouver
    San Diego
    Papeete
    Vladivostok
    Pusan
    Taipei
    Surabaya
    Durban
    Eilat
    Constanta
    Odessa
    Klaipeda
    Tallinn
    Apart from Constanta, Odessa, Klaipeda and Tallinn, the others were all crossed out. I saw those places – so far away, so different – as tracing an unbroken line around the globe, thickening in the Far East and then again in Europe but leaving a vast gap between Surabaya and Durban. Then I realised that it must be an itinerary, some abstruse trail to be followed up. I imagined that, rather than heeding Dr Barnung’s warnings and placing himself in his hands, that man had ended up believing his own visions and had hurtled off to those far-flung places in search of the phantasmagorical language whose existence his madness had summoned into being. He had visited them one by one, striking them off his list; the only ones left to visit were Constanta, Odessa, Klaipeda and Tallinn. I remembered his study course: Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian, four of the few languages with which he was as yet unacquainted and which he had perhaps gone to seek out, following his own crack-brained theories. I imagined him drinking his fill of words which his famished mouth was learning to savour; at each new one he uttered, I saw his own appearance shifting, a kaleidoscope of masks. I was tempted to think that perhaps that man was one of many, that I had encountered just one, but that there were hundreds of others like him, pursuing one another, wandering round the globe, usurping voices and faces not their own, leaving a trail of old clothes, shoes and mineral water bottles strewn behind them, as in that flat: the indecipherable armoury of madness. I decided that I would root him out from wherever he was hiding: no longer to help him, or to pool our sufferings, but rather to witness the course and climax of his madness for myself. My heart full of glee, watching him as he gasped, racked by spasmodic seizures, I would tell him that soon all his languages would crumble away and dissolve into one rank mush. Secretly, though, I sensed that it was not just the poisonous desire for vengeance that was driving me towards him. No, something stronger was at work, something I was trying to hold in check within my mind: some frightening affinity, some inexplicable and voluntary attraction which I was trying to resist with all the strength that I could muster. I felt a physical need to sense him at my side, to hear his voice, to smell the bitter odour he gave out, as though he were at once cause and cure of all my woes.
    Sensing that it was late, I shook off these thoughts; by lingering on such fantasies, I too was running the risk of going mad. The evil blossoming in the soft reaches of my mind might overwhelm me; if I wished to avoid the fate awaiting the interpreter, I would have to shuffle off such crazed woolgathering; I would have to set about finding a cure and close up the dangerous wound which was cleaving me in twain.
    Throwing a few clothes at random into a suitcase, I left one morning in late September. Heavy of heart, I looked back through the darkness at my house from a rise in the road. Would I ever be seeing it again? Would I ever go back to tend my roses, would I ever return to my old reassuring groove? At that moment, all seemed to be lost forever. The plane to Munich was almost empty; the autumn sun fell glancingly through the little windows and, as I slumped into my seat, I remembered the peaceful hours of distant afternoons, punctuated by the untroubled hum of radiators and warmed by the busy presence of Irene. I had the brief sensation that what I was embarking on was utterly absurd, that in reality