A Heart So White Page 6

  “Mother-in-law, she lyin’, yen yen yen, we jus’ playin’, yen yen yen, the way we do back home, yen yen yen.”

  Those words did startle me, even more than the first words she’d sung, because they only confirmed my initial reaction (sometimes you hear correctly but you can’t believe your ears) and I felt a slight shiver run through me, the way Luisa had shivered when she began to feel ill. And Miriam added in a neutral almost languid tone, again without any change of tone:

  “If you don’t kill her, I kill myself. Then you get one woman’s death on your hands, either her or me.”

  Guillermo didn’t reply this time, but my sense of surprise and the shiver that had run through me were provoked not by Miriam’s words but by the song, which I knew from way back, because my grandmother used to sing it to me when I was a child, or rather, she didn’t exactly sing it to me, because it wasn’t really a song for children but, in fact, formed part of a story or tale, which wasn’t meant for children either, but which she told me simply to frighten me, to fill me with pleasurable, lighthearted fear. But there were times too, when she was bored with sitting in an armchair in her apartment or in mine, fanning herself and watching the afternoon pass by until my mother came to fetch me or to take over from her, and then she’d sing songs without realizing she was doing so, to distract herself without intending to, she’d sing without even noticing what she was doing, in the same lacklustre, indifferent tone, in the same accent as Miriam by her half-open balcony doors. That unconscious singing intended for no one was the same song that maids used to sing when they were scrubbing floors or pegging out washing or hoovering or languidly dusting on days when I was ill and stayed away from school and saw the world from my pillow, listening to them in their morning mood, so different from their evening one; the same mindless singing my own mother went in for when she sat in front of the mirror brushing or pinning up her hair or when she stuck a large decorative comb in her hair and put on long earrings to go to Mass on Sundays, that almost muttered feminine song sung between clenched teeth (with pegs or hairpins clenched between those clenched teeth) which isn’t sung in order to be heard, still less interpreted or translated, but which someone, the child nestling amongst his pillows or leaning at a door other than his own bedroom door, hears and learns and never forgets, even if only because that song, unintended, intended for no one, is, despite everything, transmitted and not silenced or diluted once it’s sung, when followed by the silence of adult, or perhaps I should say masculine life. In the Madrid of my childhood, that involuntary, fluctuating song must have been sung in every house, every morning for years, like a meaningless message knitting together the whole city, binding it together and making it harmonious, a persistent veil of contagious sound covering everything, filling courtyards and doorways, wafting in at windows and down corridors, into kitchens and bathrooms, up stairways and rooftops, wearing aprons, pinafores, overalls and nightdresses and expensive gowns. All the women used to sing it in those days, days that are not so very long ago, maids sang it first thing in the morning as they yawned and stretched, ladies of the house and mothers sang it a little later on, as they were getting ready to go out shopping or perform some unnecessary errand, all of them united and made equal by that continuous, communal song occasionally accompanied by the whistling of young boys not yet at school and who, therefore, still participated in the world of women in which they moved: the delivery boys with their bikes and their heavy boxes, sick children in beds scattered with comics and coloured prints and storybooks, working children and idle children, whistling and envying one another. That song was sung all the time every day, by joyful voices and sorrowful voices, voices that were strident and downcast, dark-haired and melodious, tuneless and blonde, in every state of mind and in every circumstance, regardless of what was going on in the houses, unjudged by anyone: it was sung by a maid while she watched an ice-cream cake melting in my grandparents’ house, when they were not yet my grandparents because I hadn’t even been born, nor was there even a possibility of my being born; whistled by a boy on that same day in that same house as he walked down the corridor to the bathroom where, only shortly before, a woman full of fear and drenched in tears and water had also perhaps hummed some tune. And in the afternoons, that song would be sung by the more cracked and tenuous voices of grandmothers and widows and spinsters sitting in their rocking chairs or armchairs or on sofas keeping an eye on their grandchildren, keeping them occupied, or casting sideways glances at the portraits of people who’d already departed this life or whom they’d been unable to hold on to, sighing and fanning themselves, their whole lives spent fanning themselves even in autumn, even in winter, sighing and singing and watching past time passing. And at night, the song, more intermittent, more disparate, could still be heard in the bedrooms of those more fortunate women, who were not yet grandmothers or aunts or spinsters, a quieter, sweeter, more resigned song, a prelude to sleep, an expression of weariness, the same song Miriam had inadvertently sung to me in her hotel room identical to mine, after nightfall in Havana, such a hot night, on my honeymoon with Luisa, while Luisa neither sang nor spoke, but merely pressed her face into her pillow.

  The songs my grandmother used to sing came mainly from her own childhood, songs from Cuba and from the black nannies who’d looked after her until she was ten years old, the age when she left Havana and moved to the country across the ocean where she and her parents and her sisters imagined they belonged but which they knew only by name. Songs and stories (I can no longer separate them out in my memory) full of animal characters with absurd names – Verum-Verum the Cow, Chirrinchinchín the Monkey – sombre stories, African stories, for example, as I remember it, Verum-Verum the Cow was much loved by the family who owned her, she was a beneficent, friendly cow, rather like a nanny or a grandmother, and yet one day, goaded by hunger or by evil thoughts, the members of the family decided to kill her and cook her and eat her, which, understandably enough, poor Verum-Verum the Cow found hard to forgive in people with whom she lived so closely, and right there in the dining room, the moment each member of the family ate a piece of her butchered, aged flesh (thereby participating in a kind of metaphorical anthropophagy) a cavernous voice that never ceased issued forth from their stomachs, tirelessly repeating in the booming voice affected by my grandmother, trying hard not to laugh: “Verum-Verum the Cow, Verum-Verum the Cow”, issuing ceaselessly forth from their stomachs for ever and ever. As for Chirrinchinchín the Monkey, his adventures were, I think, so multifarious that I’ve forgotten what they were, but I have the impression that the fate he suffered proved no kinder and that he ended up roasting on the spit of some unscrupulous white man. The song Miriam had sung in the next room had no meaning for Luisa and, in that respect, as regards our knowledge or understanding of what was going on and being said through the balcony doors and the wall, there was now at least one definite difference. Because my grandmother used to tell me that fragment of a story learned from her black nannies, a story whose obvious sexual symbolism I’d never noticed until that moment, when I heard Miriam singing it or, rather, when I heard her sing the gloomy, slightly comical song that formed part of the story my grandmother used to tell me to frighten me, to fill me with a fear that was both transitory and tinged with humour (it taught me what fear was and how to laugh at it): the story told how a young woman of great beauty and even greater poverty was sought in marriage by a very rich, handsome stranger with excellent prospects, a foreigner who’d installed himself in Havana amidst a show of great luxury and ambitious plans for the future. The girl’s mother, a widow who was dependent on her only daughter or rather on the success of her very necessary marriage, was beside herself with joy and gave the man her daughter’s hand in marriage without a moment’s hesitation. Throughout the wedding night, the mother kept a distrustful or knowing watch on the door of the newlyweds’ room and, again and again, she heard her daughter sing this plea for help: “Mamita, mamita, yen yen yen, the snake’s gonna eat me up, yen ye
n yen.” Any possible alarm the greedy mother might have felt was assuaged by her son-in-law’s repeated and eccentric reply, which he too sang again and again through the door, throughout the long night: “Mother-in-law, she lyin’, yen yen yen, we jus’ playin’, yen yen yen, the way we do back home, yen yen yen.” The following morning, when the mother, and now mother-in-law, decided to go into the newlyweds’ bedroom to bring them breakfast and see their happy faces, she found only a huge snake coiled on the bloody, rumpled bed and not a trace of her dear, unfortunate daughter, so full of promise.

  My grandmother, I remember, used to laugh when she told me that macabre tale to which, now that I’m an adult, I may perhaps have added some even more macabre detail (I don’t think she said anything about blood or how long the night was); she’d laugh that rather girlish laugh of hers (perhaps the laughter of her ten-year-old – possibly even younger – self, her resolutely Cuban laughter) and fan herself, making light of the story and ensuring that I and my ten-year-old – possibly even younger – self would make light of it too, or maybe any fear the tale could arouse was a uniquely female fear, a fear proper to daughters and mothers and wives and mothers-in-law and grandmothers and nannies, a fear that belonged in the same category as the instinctive singing of women throughout the day and at dead of night, in Madrid and in Havana and everywhere, the song in which boys also share only to forget it once they cease to be boys. I’d forgotten it too, but not entirely, for you can only be said truly to have forgotten something if you can’t even remember it when someone requires you to. I hadn’t thought of that song for years but Miriam’s resigned, abstracted voice didn’t need to insist or require in order for it to surface in my memory on my honeymoon with my wife Luisa, who was lying in bed ill and, on that night of mellow moonlight, was seeing the world from her pillow or was perhaps not ready to see it at all.

  I returned to her side and stroked her hair and the back of her neck, which were again sticky with sweat, she had her face turned towards the wardrobe, her forehead perhaps, as before, crossed by fine hairs, like false, premonitory lines. I sat down at her right side and lit a cigarette, the end glowed in the mirror, I didn’t want to look at myself. Her breathing was not that of someone asleep and I whispered in her ear:

  “You’ll feel better tomorrow, my love. Go to sleep now.”

  I sat on our bed on the sheet and smoked for a while, hearing nothing further from the room next door: Miriam’s singing had been both the prelude to sleep and an expression of tiredness. It was too hot, I’d had no supper, I wasn’t sleepy, I wasn’t even tired, I didn’t sing or put out the light. Luisa was awake but not talking to me, she didn’t even respond to my good wishes, as if she were angry with me because of Guillermo, I thought, or because of Miriam, and didn’t want to show it, best let it dissolve into the sleep that refused to come. I thought I heard Guillermo close the balcony doors, but I was no longer leaning on my balcony and I didn’t go over there to check. I tapped the ash on my cigarette too hard, misjudged my aim, and it fell on to the sheet, and before picking it up with my fingers and putting it in the ashtray where it would bum itself out without burning anything else, I watched as it began to make a hole fringed with red on the sheet. I think I let it grow for longer than I should have, I watched it for some seconds, watched how the circle grew and widened, a stain that was at once black and fiery, consuming the sheet.

  I’D MET LUISA, through my work, almost a year before, in a way that verged simultaneously on the comic and the solemn. As I’ve mentioned before, we both work mainly as translators or interpreters (in order to make a living); although I work more than she does, at least on a more regular basis, which in no way implies that I’m more competent at my job, she is, or was judged to be so on the occasion of our first meeting, or perhaps she was merely judged to be generally more reliable.

  Luckily we don’t just work at the sessions and meetings held by international organizations. Although that does give one the incomparable luxury of having to work for only six months of the year (two months in London, Geneva, Rome, New York or Vienna or even Brussels and then two months at home, before returning for a further stint of two months or so in the same places), the task of the translator or interpreter of speeches and reports is boring in the extreme, both because of the identical and fundamentally incomprehensible jargon universally used by all parliamentarians, delegates, ministers, politicians, deputies, ambassadors, experts and representatives of all kinds from every nation in the world, and because of the unvaryingly turgid nature of all their speeches, appeals, protests, harangues and reports. People who have never done this kind of work might think it must be fun or, at the very least, interesting and varied, or more than that, they might even think that in a sense one is at the heart of world decisions with firsthand access to highly detailed and important information about every aspect of the lives of different races, political information, urban and agricultural information, information about armaments, cattle-raising, ecclesiastical matters, physical, linguistic, military and Olympic information, information about police matters and tourism, chemistry and propaganda, sex and television and viruses, sports and banking and cars, hydraulics and war studies and ecology and local customs. It’s true that, during my working life, I’ve translated speeches and texts by all kinds of people on the most unexpected subjects (at the start of my career I was chosen to utter the posthumous words of Archbishop Makarios, just to name one unusual example), and I’ve proved myself capable of repeating in my own language, or in any of the other languages I understand and speak, long diatribes on such absorbing subjects as the different types of irrigation in Sumatra or minorities in Swaziland and Burkina (formerly Burkina-Faso, capital city: Ouagadougou), who, like everyone else, are having a bad time of it; I’ve reproduced complicated justifications for providing children with sex education in the Venetian dialect, or the embarrassment of so doing; on the feasibility of continuing to finance the lethal and expensive weapons made by the South African factory Armscor, since, in theory, they can’t be exported; on the possibilities of building a replica of the Kremlin in Burundi or Malawi, I think it was (capital cities: Bujumbura and Zomba); on the need to split off from the Spanish peninsula the whole of the east coast (including Murcia) thus making it an island and avoiding the annual torrential rains and floods that are such a burden on the national budget; on a disease attacking marble in Parma, the spread of AIDS in the islands of Tristan da Cunha, the infrastructure of football in the Arab Emirates, low morale in the Bulgarian navy and, as happened a few years ago in Londonderry by order of a mayor who ended up being sacked, a strange ban on burying the dead, who instead were piled up in a stinking heap on a bit of waste ground. All this and more have I religiously translated and transmitted and repeated, exactly as spoken by others, by experts and scientists and luminaries and wise men from every discipline and from the most distant countries, unusual people, exotic people, erudite and eminent people, Nobel prizewinners and professors from Oxford and Harvard who would submit reports on the most surprising topics at the request of their governments or by representatives of their governments or by delegates or even by the deputies of those representatives.

  The truth is that the translations are the only fully functioning element in these organizations, which are, in fact, gripped by a veritable translatorial fever, somewhat morbid and unhealthy, for every word pronounced (in session or assembly) and every scrap of paper sent, whatever the subject, whoever it is, in principle, addressed to or whatever its objective (even if it’s highly confidential), is immediately translated into several languages, just in case. When we’re working, we translators and interpreters do nothing but translate and interpret, indiscriminately and almost without a break, for the most part without anyone knowing why something is being translated or for whom it’s being interpreted, more often than not, if it’s a written text, it’s purely for the files and, if it’s a speech, for the few odds and sods who don’t understand the second language we’re tran
slating into anyway. Some idiot has only to fire off some idiotic remark to one of these organizations for it to be instantly translated into all six official languages, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. Everything gets turned into French and into Arabic, into Chinese and Russian, be it the foolish thoughts of some enthusiast on the sidelines or some other idiot’s bright idea. Even if nothing is ever done about them, they get translated. I’ve often had passed to me for translation invoices that merely needed paying. I’m convinced those invoices will be kept in a file somewhere until the end of time, translated, at the very least, into French and Chinese, Spanish and Arabic, English and Russian. Once I got an urgent phone call in my booth asking me to translate an (unwritten) speech about to be given by a politician who, as I myself knew from the headlines splashed across the front pages of the papers two days before, had been killed in his own country during a coup d’état that had successfully achieved its goal of overthrowing him.

  The greatest sources of tension in these international fora are not the fierce discussions between delegates and representatives on the verge of declaring war, but the occasions when, for some reason, there’s no translator available to translate or, and this is not an uncommon occurrence, when the translator collapses in the middle of some report for physical or psychological reasons. You have to have a cool head in this job, not so much because of the difficulties of understanding and transmitting what is said as it is said (which is difficult enough) but because of the pressure we’re under from politicians and experts, who get upset and even angry if they think there’s a chance that something they say might not be translated into one of those six celebrated languages. They watch us all the time, as do our immediate but remote bosses (civil servants all of them), to make sure that we’re always at our posts converting everything, omitting not a single word, into the other languages even though almost no one understands them. The one thing delegates and representatives really care about is being translated and interpreted, not having their speeches and reports approved of and applauded or having their proposals taken seriously or implemented, something which almost never happens (no approval, no applause, no being taken seriously, no implementation). At a meeting of the Commonwealth countries that took place in Edinburgh, at which, therefore, all the conference members spoke English, an Australian speaker called Flaxman was outraged when he saw that the interpreters’ booths were empty and that not one of his colleagues was listening to him through the headphones provided, but were, instead, sitting in their plump seats listening to him direct through the microphone. He demanded that his words be translated and when reminded that there was no need, he frowned, uttered a foul oath and began to exaggerate his already thick Australian accent to the point where it became unintelligible to members of other countries and even to certain members of his own, who all started complaining and immediately fell victim to the reflex action of the hardened congress member who reaches for the headphones the moment anyone utters anything he can’t understand. On finding that, contrary to custom, nothing issued forth from those headphones (not the slightest sound, clear or confused), they grew even more vociferous in their protests, and Flaxman threatened to go in person to one of the cabins and act as his own interpreter. He was already halfway down the aisle when someone intervened and an Australian interpreter was swiftly found to occupy the cabin and to turn into standard English the words his compatriot, a real “larrikin” to use the term he himself would have employed, was proclaiming from the platform in his incomprehensible accent typical of the inner city areas and docklands of Melbourne, Adelaide or Sydney. When he saw that a translator was now at his post duly mirroring the ideas contained in his speech, representative Flaxman immediately calmed down and, without his colleagues even noticing, since by then they’d all decided to listen to him indirectly through their headphones, through which everything sounds somehow both much more hesitant and much more important, resumed his normal, neutral, more or less correct diction. This was the culmination of the translatorial fever that pervades and dominates international fora, a translation from English into English, not entirely accurate either it would seem, since the rebellious Australian congress member spoke too fast for the inexperienced Australian interpreter to be able to repeat it all at the same speed, omitting nothing.