Here I am. Don’t worry, I took great pains to be here.
– I have no rights. You come before me.
– What do you want from me?
– To hear what I can make my own. Everything you tell me will be …
– Useful?
– Necessary. I’ve been living with this book for two years. I’ve only just recently conceived the project of translating it.
– What would you like to talk about?
– One thing only: Angela Parkins’ death. I’d like to talk to you exactly the way I imagine Angela Parkins would if she could get out of character, if she were its ultimate presence.
– I’m listening.
– Why did you kill me?
– You’re going fast, Angela, you’re getting too directly to the heart of the essential. Wouldn’t you rather we talk first about you or about me, that somewhere we find the familiar Arizona landscapes again? [Silence] So be it, if you like, we can talk about your death right now. But first, swear to me that you didn’t see anything coming. Swear it.
– Saw what coming? Love, death? Saw what coming? Mélanie or the assassin?
– Saw reprobation coming.
– What! You would have punished me for what I am.
– I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about everything around you. Intolerance. Madness. Violence.
– In that case I saw nothing coming. Certainly I saw myself lost, delirious, wary and minotaur, drunk and arrogant, joyous and casual, nostalgic and in love but I never saw that man’s madness coming.
– And yet you knew him.
– I knew him by reputation. He was an inventor, a great scholar, but how could I ever imagine that that man carried such hatred inside him?
– You never noticed anything in his ways, in his gaze?
– He looked normal. He looked like a normal client. To tell you the truth, I never noticed him. My whole being was involved in the rhythm moving me closer to Mélanie.
– Well then I’ll tell you. I’ll try to tell you why you died so suddenly, absurdly. You died because you forgot to look around you. You freed yourself too quickly and because you thought yourself free, you no longer wanted to look around you. You forgot about reality.
– You could have helped me, given me a sign.
– It’s true that I believed you out of harm’s way, safe from barking dogs. I imagined you passionate and as such able to repel bad fate. I believed you were stronger than reality.
– But imagining the scene, you could have changed its course. You could have made the bullet ricochet or wound me slightly.
– No. It was you or him. For if this man had only wounded you, you would have turned on him with such fury that you’re the one who would have put him to death. One way or another, your life would have been ruined. Self-defence or not. That man, don’t forget, had a fine reputation.
– You dare to tell me that in order to protect me from that man, that madman, you chose to get rid of me.
– I didn’t kill you. That man killed you.
– But that man doesn’t exist. You were under no obligation to make that man exist.
– That man exists. He could be compared to the invisible wire that sections reality from fiction. In getting closer to Mélanie you wanted to cross the threshold.
– I hold you responsible for his actions. For my death.
– I’m not responsible for reality.
– Reality is what we invent.
– Don’t be cruel to me. You who are familiar with solitude, ecstasies, and torments. You and I have never thought of protecting ourselves. In this we have come a long way but sooner or later reality catches up.
– I can reproach you for what is in your book.
– By what right?
– Reading you gives me every right.
– But as a translator you have none. You’ve chosen the difficult task of reading backwards in your language what in mine flows from source.
– But when I read you, I read you in your language.
– How can you understand me if you read me in one language and simultaneously transpose into another what cannot adequately find its place in it? How am I to believe for a single moment that the landscapes in you won’t erase those in me?
– Because true landscapes loosen the tongue in us, flow over the edge of our thought-frame. They settle into us.
– I remember one day buying a geology book in which I found a letter. It was a love letter written by a woman and addressed to another woman. I used the letter as a bookmark. I would read it before reading and after reading. For me that letter was a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading. I would have liked to know this woman, I imagined the face of the woman for whom it was meant. It was during that time that I started writing the book you want to translate. Yes, you’re right, there are true landscapes that pry us from the edge and force us onto the scene.
– I think there is always a first time, ‘a first time when it must be acknowledged that words can reduce reality to its smallest unit: matter of fact.’ Do you remember those words?
– No, but I think that whoever said that was right. I’m weary. Is there anything else you wish to know?
– I mostly wanted to hear you talk about death. But no matter what happens, we’re alone, aren’t we?
– Keep to beauty, have no fear. Muffle civilization’s noises in you. Learn to bear the unbearable: the raw of all things.
Le Désert mauve
1987, tr. 1990
HOTEL RAFALE
from Baroque at Dawn
tr. Patricia Claxton
First the dawn. Then the woman came.
In
