The Interpreter by Diego Marani, Judith Landry Read Free Book Online

Although I didn’t admit as much, it was Irene whom I was hoping to meet. I would follow every woman who looked remotely like her, catch up with her, already knowing that she was not the person I wanted her to be, walk past her and wander off disconsolate, talking to myself like a mad man.
    It was the park that I preferred for my solitary ramblings; I would walk, head bowed, along the lakeside, until the call of a seagull or a hooting ferry roused me from my aimless drifting. I’d sit down wearily on a bench, pondering the route of my bleak return. Each hour of the day, each district, recalled a thousand memories, which flew off like flocks of birds at my approach, leaving foul feathers scattered on the grass, all that remained of what had once been such rich swag. Everything fled from me, but everything also pursued me, doggedly. In the deepest shade of the park I sometimes thought I heard the interpreter’s squawking and braying and, to my alarm, would find that I had ended up at that very place on the lake shore where I had seen him last. I would hurry off, trying to resist the temptation to turn round, and when at last I yielded, all that I saw was the sun’s fitful dazzle on the flower-filled shore and the brightly coloured ice-cream van slithering along the gravelled alleyway with its mournful peal of bells. A breath of fear would ripple through the wet grass, the feeling that something fateful had happened just at that very moment and that I was the only man in the world who was unaware of it. I would be seized by the certainty that something awesome had occurred, but I did not know what; all I felt was the need to remember, to note the light, the colour of the sky, the time, the landscape. So that at least would remain for me.
    At night I would lock myself up in the big empty house. The only room I now used was my study; I’d put a camp bed in it, and would lie there for hours, staring up at the sky until the light drained away and darkness reigned at last. I would doze off, briefly, only to be hounded by the start of a nightmare in which Irene’s reproaches would mingle with obscure threats from the interpreter, dragging me from the lukewarm waters of sleep. Since the interpreter had no clearly defined face, it was she who would begin to bark at me, cawing, hissing, staring at me with the eyes of a wild beast, uttering senseless words, like those of a sorceress. I would lie there for hours, drowsing uneasily like a creature beached on scorching sand, racked by fits of exhausted, dry-eyed weeping; only at dawn did I manage to fall asleep for a few hours, to wake up cold and aching, my head still full of the gibberish that had peopled my nightmares, which I repeated to myself mechanically – against my will, it seemed to have become lodged in my tangled memory, to have cemented itself into my mind. On my walks through the park, I would find myself uttering these senseless words out loud, in time to the rhythm of my steps, of my breath, of the music of popular songs played on the radio; they bored themselves insistently into my brain, prolonging night-time anguish into the daylight hours. I even tried putting them side by side, to see if, aligned with one another, they would take on any sense. I broke them down, turned them around, read them backwards, covered whole sheets of paper with them. I went to look them up in foreign dictionaries I’d found in the translation department library.
    Sometimes, on my way home, it seemed to me that Irene had been back, that she’d come to look for me while I was out. I went through every room in the house, following imaginary traces of her passing, but all that I found was the dull whiteness of dust on the parquet, the stale scent of my lost peace of mind lingering in some corner. In her pursuit, I combed the city from side to side; I called all the numbers in the little notebook she’d left beside the phone, only to be answered by hairdressers closed for the holidays,