The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer Read Free Book Online Page B

fluency, when it was suggested he serve as translator. “
¡No me acuerdo de nada!
” And try as I might, I saw that there was no way at all of persuading him to speak a tongue in which he might possibly, just possibly, in the space of several paragraphs, make a single tiny error. And so I went back to my horrible task, stumbling through more accounts of torments made scarcely more pleasant by the dawning realization, as the Argentine speaker interrupted my translations and the whole family fell into animated debate about which parts I was distorting most, that the main speaker knew more English than I did Spanish; that his wife,who had sat through it all with a look of great pain, spoke both languages well; and that their son, who was enrolled in a Manhattan junior high school, was fluently bilingual. “And so I say to you, my friends,” Juan Carlos said through me, my unhappy look a fair translation of his own, “that your efficiency and discipline and unity have turned this country into the third-strongest power in the world. Just think what you could do if you worked on behalf of human rights!”
    Later that night, Mark and I went to a
yakitori
house nearby for dinner. Just as I happened to look around, in the midst of our conversation, the young Japanese man next to me caught my eye. “Excuse me,” he began. “May I talk English with you?”
    “Of course,” I said, more than grateful to be back in my own tongue.
    “What country do you come from? How long are you in Japan? How do you find Japan?” Trying to find answers compatible with these phrasebook questions, I felt as if I were being worked on by a student doctor eager to practice his still-unformed skills.
    “I saw the American movie
2010
,” he went on, though whether in a spirit of bonhomie or bewilderment I could not tell. “I could understand the computer — Hal. No problem. But I could not understand the human beings.”
    “Really?” I said, not sure how to take this.
    “But she” — he pointed to his glumly chic young consort — “she is student of English literature.”
    Ah, I thought, my years of study were not in vain.
    “What courses are you taking?” I began.
    “One course,” she said haltingly, and with some apparent pain. “It is in Henry James.” I registered surprise that they would be given the most byzantine of English stylists to begin with. “And,” she went on with a bulldozer determination, “in other course, we study nineteenth literature.”
    “Nineteenth century?”
    She nodded unhappily, her eyes never once leaving her bowl.
    “Dickens, for example?”
    “Not Dickens,” she said with some authority. “Dickens is twentieth. We do Swift.”
    Ah, I thought: the inscrutable Orient.
    “Don’t worry,” said Mark consolingly as we made our way home. “You’ll soon find ways of getting out of that. Everyone does, sooner or later.”
    Back in his house, while making some tea, Mark put on an old tape of Ry Cooder: lazy, sunlit songs about the border.
    “Nice album,” I remarked.
    “Yeah. It’s funny! This was the very same tape that Ray had with him while he was living in the monastery. Did I tell you about Ray? No? Well, anyway, Ray was this huge, king-size guy from Dallas, who came over to join the Peace Corps in the Philippines and somehow ended up as a Zen monk over in Daitokuji. And somehow, he had this deal worked out whereby he kept a motorbike outside the monastery walls, together with his cowboy boots and leather jacket. And every few weeks, he would steal out to visit his girlfriend. Or occasionally he’d come over to my house. And every time he came, whatever time it was, it was always party time, because this was the only chance he was going to get. Jeez, he was something! He just had this incredible energy, which living in the monastery only intensified. And the monks couldn’t come down on him so long as he made it back before morning prayers at four a.m.
    “Well, he had the stamina to keep