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

I got home, I rushed up, panting, to the bathroom mirror: what I saw reflected before me was not my usual gaunt face, but one with the glassy eyes of a fish, a foam-flecked mouth like the jaws of a wild beast, and the rough and scaly skin of a reptile – a constant succession of metamorphosing animals, not one of them containing anything of my original self. I drew what breath I could and bared my teeth to pronounce my name: ‘Felix Bellamy! I’m Felix Bellamy, born in Geneva on June 13th 1950!’ I shrieked at the top of my voice, and only then did I burst into tears. Terrible days followed: I no longer dared to speak. In the office I pretended to have lost my voice, I addressed my secretary in monosyllables, or using words I’d cautiously tried out beforehand, outside the door. At home in the evenings I’d read out loud from some work document, to see how serious the problem was – I could feel it spreading ominously within me. Inevitably it would recur: just when I felt the warm flow of words running evenly and freely from my throat, suddenly they would crumble into contorted syllables, become guttural stuttering sounds, then whistles. I tried to resist this transformation with all my might, twisting my neck, raising my chin, grinding my teeth, thrusting my tongue vainly backwards to free it from the knot which was throttling it at its root. But in the end all that remained of my voice was a raucous shout, gurgling like vomit from some unknown breach in my glottis. It all happened almost without my noticing, as though some other being had taken temporary possession of my mouth to use it as its own – some unknown and monstrous being which had made its way into my body and was struggling laboriously to come out into the world.
    It didn’t take me long to realise what had happened. I was ill, I could no longer hide the fact. The illness that had found its home within me was a parasite, a sort of fungus, an unthinking worm, made up of merciless cells which would devour me if I did not have some recourse to action. But was it not already too late? After much hesitation, remembering the psychiatric report attached to his medical notes, I decided to go to the archives and look for the file on the interpreter. I wanted to track down the specialist who had diagnosed his illness and put myself in his hands – before it was too late, for me as well. On the last page of the file I found the name and address of Dr Herbert Barnung, a German expert who had done years of research into language disorders.
    I left for Munich one muggy day in late summer. The airport was extremely quiet; the girls at the cash desks in the duty-free shops were twirling around on their stools, underemployed, shoes off, scratching one heel with the big toe of the other foot, and inspecting their nails. In the corridors leading to the flight decks, the only sound was the customs men’s radios crackling behind the plate glass of their cabins. Once I’d boarded the plane, the mood seemed to be one of intense expectation: peering at the faces of the other passengers, absorbed in their newspapers, I had the impression that we were all going to see Dr Barnung. His consulting room turned out to be in the new part of the city, at the edge of extensive woods and lawns dotted with flowerbeds. What I particularly remember of that warm and sunny afternoon is the outline of a cat crouching on the sill behind the tinted glass of a window giving onto the garden, the long shadows cast on the wall by the seats in the waiting room, the old magazines on the table and Dr Barnung himself, thin and pale in his white gown, coming towards me and holding out his hand, yet at the same time somewhat forbidding, with the spare look of a military man used to a frugal life style. He had hard features, prominent cheekbones, a high, freckled forehead; behind his clear blue eyes I sensed the shadow of distant trouble, the force of an iron will. His consulting room had heavy wooden