EVERYONE WANTS TO BE a writer, I’ve found. Everyone thinks it couldn’t be that hard. If you spend a lot of time around writers, as I do, the idea becomes even more plausible. They’re not really that smart, some of them. They’re not really that talented, some of them. All that separates us from them is a book, and sometimes not even that.
I’m a translator, from Spanish to English, which means that although I don’t often get credit for, say, the last Gloria de los Angeles novel you picked up, the words in the novel are in fact my words. My English words. My choices. I wrote crimson, when I could have written blood red. In many cases, I’ll tell you modestly, I’ve improved the words I was given. Texts are fluid. Words can be substituted, each brick of the house removed and replaced. Afterwards, is it still the same house? The original author thinks so. But I know differently.
If what a writer writes is words, then I am a writer. I have books full of my words. But I am not a writer. Not a real one. I used to think I might be. I used to mull over how I might start, used to wonder how to cross the bridge from nobody to novelist. What separated me from them?
Plot and character? When you’ve translated as many books as I have, it’s not hard to look at the creakiness of some story lines, the thinness of most characterizations and to think, “I could do better than that. At least I couldn’t do worse.” I didn’t have much to say as a writer, but again, neither do lots of authors with books on the bestseller list. They have intriguing lives, or beautiful faces, or strange little gimmicks, but very few interesting ideas. I’d be in good company.
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.
“Elvira Montalban,” I said promptly. “You know, the Argentinean novelist?”
“Yes, I think I’ve heard of her,” he said, impressed by my conviction.
But someone else in the building must have told him that I was living there on my own, because the next time I saw him, he avoided me.
Occasionally, I would go to lectures at the Nordic House. One evening I saw that an American researcher would be reporting in English on a study he’d done on S.A.D.—Seasonal Affective Disorder. I went, as usual, in a state of some dishevelment. When I stood up at the end to ask my question, I noticed that my voice was rusty with disuse, and also, that I had a Spanish accent.
“Why do you start from the assumption that S.A.D. is bad?” I demanded. “In some cultures, being depressed is considered the norm and the good.”
“What cultures are these?” the researcher asked with interest, but then someone explained to him that I was just some crazy South American woman, and he went on to the next question.
I stared at my nailbitten fingers in surprised shock.
I had become Elvira Montalban.
In February, I returned to London and to Nicola’s house, and turned the completed manuscript in to Farquharson and Pendergast. Although Jane still complained that the translation read a bit awkwardly in places, she was generally quite impressed with the story—and even more with the mystery of the whole thing. She had me out to dinner at a little place in Soho and tried to pump me for more information about Elvira, but I kept my head. I didn’t even respond to Jane’s rather too-friendly embrace at the end of the evening. She was the sort of well-bred English girl I simply couldn’t feel comfortable around. Nicola knew her from some charity work and said she was horribly snobbish.
Besides, there was Pendergast, and Nicola said she was even worse.
The Academy of Melancholy appeared that autumn and was immediately hailed as a work of great gravity and importance.
“A Metaphorical Descent Into the Abyss of Argentinean Politics,” said The Guardian. “A beautiful and terrifying evocation of terror and exile,” wrote the Times reviewer. “The author [cribbing here from the publicity materials], resident in one of the Northern countries, splashes the colors of the tropics across the frozen wastes.” “Chilling,” said the Telegraph. (A partial quote.) And, my favorite, “Brilliantly translated by Cassandra Reilly.” Farquharson and Pendergast had gotten a friend of theirs to blurb it. “The most interesting book [besides my own] I have read in the last ten years,” wrote Gillian Winterbottom. High praise indeed.
I knew that I would be hearing from Luisa. And I did.
“Who is this Elvira Montalban?” she wrote, from her residency at the University of Iowa. “What does it mean, ‘resident of a Northern country’? I have never heard of her. Someone here read it and says we have a similar style. I don’t think so at all. Who publishes her in Spain or Argentina? What is the Spanish name of this book and where can I get a copy?”
After the reviews, invitations to appear on panels and to attend conferences began to pour in for Elvira. The book was published in America, where it made an even greater stir. More offers poured in, and more hysterical letters from Luisa, demanding to know I was not abandoning her for this new writer. Jane referred all requests for interviews and appearances to me, and I referred them, with great regret, to the trash receptacle.
Elvira’s fame would plummet like a stone if it were revealed that she was really an Irish-Catholic girl from Kalamazoo, Michigan.
About nine or ten months after The Academy of Melancholy first appeared in England, Jane called me. I had been in and out of London, travelling to see friends and pick up work of course, but also to avoid Luisa, who had made two trips to England specifically to track me down.
“I asked you repeatedly about the rights situation, Cassandra,” Jane fumed. “And you said she didn’t want to be published in Spain or Argentina.”
“That’s absolutely true,” I said, prepared to defend my position again. “She’s writing under a pen name and she’s afraid of repercussions.”
“Then how do you account for the fact that the book has just been published in Madrid?”
“Madrid? Impossible!” I sputtered. “Completely impossible. Elvira doesn’t…I mean, she could never, I mean, she would never allow…”
“Elvira not only allowed it,” Jane snapped. “She’s promoting it like crazy. She’s not only alive and well, but she’s not living in Reykjavík. She’s living in Madrid. And her face is all over the literary pages of Spain’s newspapers. It’s a face that, I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, you claimed she refused to have photographed.”
“Face? Photograph? It must be a joke. I told you, she’s reclusive and practically certifiable.”
“Don’t toy with me, Cassandra.” And Jane rang off.
A short time later, a messenger arrived at my door with an envelope from Jane. It contained a batch of clippings from the Spanish newspapers. The face, long, narrow, with heavily made-up eyes, looked completely unfamiliar. I raced through the reviews and interviews, looking for some clue.
“I always wanted to write,” she said in one. “But I never believed that my experiences in Iceland would be any use to me. I thought that to write I would have to write directly about the situation in Buenos Aires, and that I thought I could never do.”
“What changed your mind?” the reporter asked.
“A conversation I had with a stranger some years ago in a cafe,” said the false Elvira. “She seemed so fascinated in my descriptions of the snow and the great sadness of that time in my life, that I tried to see what I could make of it.”
The liar, the worse-than-plagiarizer, the thief.
She wasn’t Elvira Montalban. She was Maria Escobar. I remembered her now.
It had been a chance encounter in a cafe in Paris some years ago. An intriguing but not particularly attractive woman, wearing, although it was spring and getting warmer, a half-length jacket. A jacket of rather soiled sheepskin. When she took it off, her dress was surprisingly chic, but also rather soiled, with permanent stains under the arms. She was between forty and fifty, with dyed black hair in a heavy bun, no earrings or other jewelry. She sat at a table outdoors that afternoon, sheltered from the wind. A familiar place. The waiter seemed to know her, but not to like her particularly. Once or twice when she spoke to him, he ignored her for the second it took to let her know she was unimportant to him, and then, “Oui, Madame?” And this, too, seemed familiar. She was not insulted. She seemed to expect it. A foreigner in some way, yet her French was excellent.
She took out a portfolio of papers, and two or three small dictionaries, and began to work. I understood immediately. She was a translator. Back and forth her eyes scanned, and her writing was rhythmic and assured. Occasionally she looked up a word, but for the most part it seemed routine work, and not particularly engaging.
Eventually I struck up a conversation with her, in French that quickly turned to Spanish, that was restrained at first, and then more voluble. I had the sense she had not talked with anyone for a long time, and certainly not about her life. She was from Argentina, had spent a time in prison there and had gotten out with the help of Amnesty International, which had sent her to Denmark. There she had married an Icelandic businessman who had taken her back to his country. She didn’t live in Reykjavík any longer. They had divorced; for some years she had lived in Paris. She had some work that was fairly unsatisfying in a multinational corporation translating back and forth from Spanish to English to French. Documents of some sort. I remember how her long fingers, with their unkempt nails, fiddled nervously with the papers. Several times she told me that she had a deadline the next day. And yet she made no move to leave.
Nor did I. The waiter ignored us. We let our conversation roam. I listened a great deal, watched her face. Her lipstick was an old-fashioned shade of burgundy and had flaked dryly at the corners of her mouth. She had a faint mustache. She seemed a woman with her life behind her. “I wanted so much more for myself once,” I remember her telling me, and the words floated up in the spring evening air, for twilight had supplanted afternoon.
“What did you want?”
“To write,” she said.
“Everybody wants to be a writer,” I said. “I’ve often thought of it myself, being a translator.”
“But I really wanted it,” she told me.
We kissed when we parted and promised to keep in touch, but I was on my way from Paris to Mozambique to visit a friend, and I lost her card almost immediately.
I had not thought of her again, until I saw her photograph in the newspaper.
The cheek of it. Those stories she told me that day long ago were nothing like what I’d written. Or were they? In truth, I had forgotten the substance of what she’d told me. I only remembered the cafe, the waiter, the scent of spring, the way she tapped the papers under her fingers.
But she wasn’t going to get away with this. Jane would make sure I never worked as a translator again in England or America, if I didn’t get a handle on this and fast.
I called my local bucket shop and got a flight that same evening for Madrid.
Life in Spain, and especially Madrid, doesn’t really get going until around midnight, so even though it was after ten when my friends Sandra and Paloma met me at the airport, they told the taxi driver to head into the center, to the Puerto del Sol. First, for old times’ sake, we did the rounds of half a dozen bars. In some we had a pincho, a mouthful, and in others a racíon, a plateful. Squid, octopus, shrimp—all fine with me, though I drew the line at tripe and recognizable parts of pigs. We drank a little red wine at each place and then moved on. Eventually we had dinner, and afterward joined the throngs of Madrileños, jamming the sidewalk cafes and narrow streets. It was a May night, warm but not too hot, and it seemed perfectly normal to be wandering around a large city at three a.m. without a fear in the world. We finished up the evening with a Guinness at an Irish bar Sandra and Paloma had recently discovered.
At four we took a taxi to their modern new apartment building far into the suburbs. Sandra and Paloma had come up in the world. When I first knew them, Sandra was on leave from the University of York, writing her dissertation on Women in Nineteenth-century Madrid, and teaching an English class at the university; and Paloma was a struggling scriptwriter. Now Sandra was a professor here and Paloma worked on a hugely successful television show called ¿Quién sabe dónde? or Who Knows Where?
“It’s just a missing person show,” Sandra explained, as Paloma popped a tape of a recent show in the VCR, “but somehow it’s tapped into the national psyche. Everybody watches it religiously.”
“I write the scripts,” said Paloma. “I have a lot of fun. Of course it’s all supposed to be completely true.”
The video showed a distraught mother on the phone to her daughter, pleading with her to come home. Strangely enough, a film crew seemed to be right in the mother’s pink-and-blue bedroom with her, as well as in the disco where her daughter was shouting, “I hate you, I’ll never come home!” into the receiver.
¿Quién sabe dónde? reminded me of Maria Escobar, the word thief. Who knew where she was, indeed? I’d told Sandra and Paloma I was in Madrid to meet with the author of La academia de la melancholía, but I hadn’t told them the whole story.
“Yes, that book is very well-known,” they told me. “The author seemed to come out of nowhere and is a great success. We have a copy if you’d like to read it.”
“Oh just leave it around,” I said casually. But as soon as they were in bed, I grabbed it and spent the rest of the night reading La academia de la melancholía. The same plot, the same characters, the same mood. Everything the same. Except the words. The Spanish was excellent, beautiful, much better than my original Spanish had been, the Spanish I’d written down those snowy mornings well over a year ago in Reykjavík. How could that be? This was a translation of my work from English. But it read as though it was the original Spanish.
Saturday night we went out on the town again, and Sunday we drove to a small village outside the city to visit Paloma’s mother. Paloma might be a high-rolling, chain-smoking TV executive during the week, but on Sundays she wore a plain dress and flat shoes and helped her mother make dinner.
On Monday I called Elvira Montalban’s publishing house and requested a meeting with the author. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” the receptionist said. “Our authors don’t have time to meet with readers.”
“But I’m her…English translator. I came especially from London to meet her.”
“In that case, I’ll see what I can do.”
She rang back in fifteen minutes to say that Elvira had agreed to meet me the following day for lunch. “She’s looking forward to it,” the receptionist told me.
The restaurant where Maria-Elvira suggested we meet was a typical mesón, a dimly lit inn with a wood oven, a tile floor, and oak beams. The specialties of such places were offal dishes and a chickpea-chorizo stew, known as cocido.
I had plenty of time to study the menu and mull over the predilection of Madrileños for brains and intestines and stomach linings, not to mention pig trotters, ears, and even snouts. Maria-Elvira was late, so late that I thought she wasn’t going to show. When she finally appeared, I was amazed at the change in her. She looked elegant and well-dressed, no longer with her hair bundled up and her make-up too thick, no longer wearing clothes that seemed wrong somehow. Her face was still long, her brows still heavy, but her hair was fashionably cut and streaked and her lips were a luscious shade of crimson. She made her way over to my table with determined grace, a woman who had found her role.
“Well,” she said in Spanish. “We meet again, my friend.” She kissed my cheek lightly, as if we were great pals.
I couldn’t help it. I admired her. She looked the part of Elvira Montalban so much better than I ever could, me with my wild Irish hair and freckles, with my working-class fears of making a social faux-pas. Maria-Elvira looked Spanish, she looked intellectual, she looked like a writer.
Stop it! I told myself. Elvira Montalban is your creation. This Maria Escobar is nothing but an opportunist.
I handed her my menu without speaking.
“The menu del día is very good here,” she said, without looking at the menu. “Unless you prefer tripe or brains.”
I shook my head. She gestured confidently to the waiter and gave him our order, two cocidos, then turned to me with a slight smile that showed her rather large teeth.
I found that I was almost intimidated by her. In Paris, she’d had the look of a displaced person, marginalized by history and geography. She had spoken softly and timidly to the cafe waiter and had cringed when he turned his back on her. She had seemed to me one of those people in the world who have been hurt rather badly, and in many different ways, so that they do not spring back.
Now she did not shrink. Now she took up space.
“Not many of these old places left,” she said conversationally. She took out a pack of cigarettes, offered them to me, and then lit up. She hadn’t smoked before, but now she seemed to luxuriate in it. She poured wine from the carafe and took a drink. Then she called the waiter over and ordered a better bottle.
“How long have you been in Madrid?” I asked her grudgingly.
“Oh, about two years, perhaps. I stayed on in Paris for a while, but of course I was really dying there, I see that now. I thought at first I was homesick, so I decided to go back to Buenos Aires. But naturally, once I got there, after twenty years away, I realized that everything had changed and I had no place there anymore. I spent about six unhappy months, and then decided to come to Madrid, and to do what I’d always wanted to do, which was to write. Of course, my stay in Argentina was very useful in that it put me in mind of old familiar places, and especially a kind of mood I wanted for my book.”
Cocido is usually served in three courses. The first of these, a rich broth with a little rice, now arrived. I thought, This woman must be a schizophrenic. She’s actually convinced herself that she’s Elvira Montalban. She sounds like she’s giving an interview to a newspaper.
“And you, Cassandra,” she said, sipping her broth appreciatively. “What have you been up to? Still travelling as much as ever? You were off to Mozambique then as I recall.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Still travelling. That is, when I’m not writing.”
“So you’re writing too?” No, she wasn’t insane. There was a twinkle in her eye. As if this were all a joke.
“You know perfectly well what I’ve been writing.”
“I don’t, really,” she answered, dabbing gently at the corners of her mouth. “Is it something based on your experiences, or did you borrow someone else’s?”
Just then a couple of men, middle-aged, genial, expensively suited, entered the restaurant. Maria-Elvira waved them over. They all kissed and then she introduced them to me.
“My publisher,” she said, “and my editor. This is Cassandra Reilly. She translated my book into English.”
“Ah, yes, an unusual case,” said the publisher. “It’s not often where the translation comes out before the original.”
“I’d tried many publishing houses and had been turned down,” said Maria-Elvira sweetly. “Without the book’s success in England and America, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have had a chance in Spain.”
“Well, the novel never crossed my desk,” said the editor. “I’m sure I would have noticed it.”
They settled at a table in the corner, out of earshot. The second course of the cocido arrived: chickpeas, with the vegetables from the stew, cabbage, leeks, onions, turnips. Maria-Elvira attacked it with relish.
“You set this up, didn’t you?” I said. “Suggesting we meet at the restaurant where you know they always eat. It wasn’t coincidental.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Maria-Elvira said. “Now where were we? Your writing? Yes. You were telling me where you get your ideas.”
“You stole my book,” I said. “You’re not Elvira Montalban. You’re Maria Escobar.”
“You stole my life.”
“I made the stories up. They’re not realistic. They’re fantastical.”
“You took my stories about my preparatory school and about my teachers, and you turned them into something else. You put the school in the future, and let the snow fall and gave it a fancy name. But it’s my life. You captured my life perfectly.”
“Living a life is not the same as writing about it,” I said, but I faltered slightly.
“That chapter where the girl from the happy family sees her parents dragged off by the militia? That conversation in the interrogation chamber? That clandestine love affair between the powerful professor and the young student? I could name several more, many more scenes that were just as I told you. Didn’t I tell you too about my terribly sad marriage to the Icelander and those dreadful winters we passed in Reykjavík, hardly speaking while the snow fell on and on? Didn’t I?”
Her voice sounded so familiar to me. As if it were an inner voice of mine made visible. As if the cadences of her speech were something I’d written down from dictation.
The waiter asked me if I’d finished my second course. I’d hardly touched it, though Maria-Elvira had finished hers. He brought the third and final plate: a pile of meat—beef, chorizo, blood sausage, some bits of unidentified organs and, poking out from the middle of the pile, a pig’s trotter.
Instead of tackling it immediately, as she had the other two courses, Maria-Elvira brought out a pile of papers from her bag. “You see, I’ve already been writing my second novel. The publisher has accepted it. It will be published next year.”
“You can’t do that. You’re not Elvira. I’m Elvira.”
“Have you written anything more by Elvira Montalban?”
I had to admit that no, I had not.
“Because you have nothing to say. You have no stories to tell, now that you have used up mine. But I still have stories to tell.”
I opened my mouth, but stopped. My story was that of an Irish-Catholic girl from Kalamazoo. I had been inventing myself as a traveller and translator since I left home. I had no stories that I wanted to tell, no stories that were either true or literary, no stories I thought anyone would want to hear.
Now Maria-Elvira began to eat, and gestured to me to join her. “I’ve always found this dish so curious, how it’s served. Separating all the parts out, the broth, the vegetables, the meat. It’s quite a metaphor, don’t you think? My ideas were the broth, nourishing but thin; your translation the vegetables, good but not filling. And my final version is the meat, chewy, spicy, substantial.”
“You call it a final version. You don’t call it a translation?”
“They were my words to start out with and now they’re my words again. You will never write another book, Cassandra Reilly, but I will write a dozen more. I’m a writer now. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened.”
“I know how it happened,” I began, but in truth I didn’t know. The process from nobody to novelist was just as mysterious to me as it had ever been.
The editor and publisher came over again. “I was just telling Cassandra about my next book,” said Maria-Elvira, patting the manuscript beside her.
“It’s quite brilliant from what I’ve seen,” said the editor. “We expect it to have an even greater success than La academia de la melancholía.”
“Now all we need is title,” said the publisher. “Has anything come to you yet?”
“Yes,” said Maria-Elvira. She pushed her plate away. All that was left of the meat course was the bones. “I’m thinking of calling it simply The Translator.”
I started.
“Because that’s really what it’s about, my years of translation.”
“The Translator,” said the editor. “Plain and yet evocative.”
“I like it too,” said the publisher, turning to me, “Have you and Elvira already begun the translation process?”
“Yes,” said Maria-Elvira quickly. “I wouldn’t have anyone else. Because Cassandra understands the craft extremely well. She understands it’s not just the art of substituting words for other words. It’s a form of writing in itself. What one might call—a collaboration.”
Pendergast wasn’t pleased of course, but Jane Farquharson took the long view, especially after she received a charming letter from Elvira Montalban explaining the reasons for the secrecy. She told Jane that she would be happy to give her new novel to Farquharson and Pendergast on the condition that I, Cassandra, remain her translator. Along with the letter she sent a box of hothouse flowers.
And that’s how I became the translator of, or rather, the collaborator of, Elvira Montalban, the author to whom Luisa Montiflores is often compared these days, the comparison, of course, highly favoring Elvira.