The Book Sense 76
-- The Children's 76
-- Category Top 10s

Chapter One: Dominique

I was in the dark. Or at least in semidarkness. I always worked best when the light in the booth was dim. So I was in this half-lit makeshift booth, in the semidarkness except for a blue glow from my tiny reading lamp. In the semidarkness, in the makeshift booth in the gray conference hall on Lexington Avenue in New York City.

My colleague that day was a spotty Liverpudlian who had once put his hand on my thigh while I was in the middle of a piece of simultaneous translation. I had shifted my position and carried on translating from French to English, spouting forth about the size and hue of tomatoes, and managed after that to avoid his gaze for months. Other female interpreters had reacted more aggressively to his clammy paws and had complained to the International Interpreters' Association, but I had said nothing. These days, for fear of being struck off he picked at his skin and his cuticles rather than seeking out the thighs of his colleagues.

"You go first Dominique," he said.

I nodded and pulled my headphones down over my ears. I looked at my watch. Four minutes to go. The delegates were filing back into the hall. Black-, brown-, red-, gray-haired doctors and researchers, all of them sauntering back into the room. I pushed my hair off my face and took a few long deep breaths. Usually the intense concentration of the morning had calmed my nerves and by the afternoon I was raring to go, running closely behind the voice of the speaker, following his rhythm, his intonation, his speed, his tone. But on that Friday the adrenaline was still pumping at the start of the afternoon session. I put it down to stress. I put it down to the effects of my conversation with Anna the week before. Now sitting in the blue glow with three minutes to go before kickoff, through my headphones, I heard not the shuffling of the delegates' papers, but last week's conversation that had played itself over and over again in my head.

"He's bad," she had said in her almost accentless English.

"How bad?" I had asked.

"He's bad," she repeated. "He has ulcers in his mouth. He's horribly thin. He can't concentrate. I'm trying to persuade him to take the medication now. He's told his father about it."

"How are you?" I asked.

"I'm not so great, Dom," she said. "Not so great. I feel, you know, like you feel when it could be the beginning of the end for someone you love. I feel, I feel . . ."

The line had gone dead.

The receiver crackled. My headphones crackled. My colleague prodded me rather too close to my thigh. It was my turn to interpret. Through the glass of the booth I could make out the chairman of the conference limping up the steps. He turned his red fleshy face toward his audience. I swallowed. The chairman cleared his throat too loudly. It hurt my eardrums.

I reached for my control panel and adjusted the red volume button. The chairman began.

"Bon après-midi mesdames et messieurs, je vous souhaite la bienvenue à la deuxième partie de notre conference."

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the second part of our conference.

"J'espère que vous n'êtes pas trop ensommeillés après tout cet alcool pour apprécier notre prochain orateur . . ."

I hope you're not too sleepy after all that red wine, to appreciate our next speaker.

Dr. Katz came up onto the podium. I looked at the watch Paul had bought me, so that I would "feel" every second I was away from him. The light was too low to see the hands, but I knew I had about twenty-five minutes to go. We worked in half-hour sessions. That was about as far as the concentration would stretch in a stint of simultaneous interpreting. It was tough stuff. Interpreters are more prone to strokes and brain hemorrhages from stress than the rest of the population.

I felt the Liverpudlian staring. I closed my eyes and the words of the speaker kaleidoscoped in and out of mine. He talked of the need to find a cure for the common cold, the number of working days missed because of the virus, the amount of ineffectual medication on the market, the hunt, the chase to be the first to come up with something new, exciting, innovative. He spoke faster and faster. I ran faster and faster behind him. His breathing was shallow. Obviously a smoker. You could always tell when you were interpreting a smoker. The speaker took a sip of water. I weighed up whether there was time to take a sip of mine. I decided against it. I would have fallen a sentence behind him and it was always hard to catch up. The Liverpudlian prodded me again. I looked at him. He pointed to the control panel. It was his turn to take over. I nodded, all the while talking, finishing my sentence, finishing the speaker's sentence, talking about the advances in his research. I switched off my microphone a split second before he switched on his. A seamless transition from my voice to his. My colleague began to talk. I rolled my neck from side to side, unclenched my fists and vowed to get out of the habit of digging my nails into my palms till they bled while I translated. Some of the delegates turned around to stare at us, startled by the change of voice in their ears. At moments like this they suddenly remembered they were listening to human beings and not to machines. I stood up and carefully pushed open the cardboard door of the booth. I closed it silently and crept out of the back of the conference hall along the corridor to the bathrooms.

In the white tiled room I sat down on a low black stool in front of a huge mirror. I looked at myself without seeing, brushed my reddy-brown hair, applied my lipstick and just sat there. Words buzzed in my head, unstoppable as the threatening hum of a circling mosquito. Not the words of the speaker I had just translated, though that would hardly have been unusual. I often heard other people's words, other people's voices in my head for hours after I came out of the booth. The feeling is the same as when you have sat in front of a computer screen for hours and for some time afterward the words dance in front of your eyes. But no, these were not the speaker's words. I just kept on hearing that line of Anna's, "He has ulcers in his mouth. He's horribly thin. . . . He can't concentrate."

I found myself now translating the words into French. Sitting on the stool in the ladies room and whispering to myself, "Il a des plaques dans la bouche, il est affreusement mince . . . il n'arrive pas à se concentrer." You idiot, I thought, what use is this?

Someone flushed a toilet. I realized I had been out of the booth for more than ten minutes. You never did that to your colleague. You never stayed away for more than ten minutes. He might want you to look up a word. He might be having a coughing fit and need you to take over. I ran back down the corridor, tiptoed into the conference hall, and slipped back into the booth.

It was lighter now. They had pulled back the heavy purple velvet curtains at the side of the hall. I could see the Liverpudlian clearly. He had been attacking his face viciously while he had been working. He turned and gave me a dirty look. I looked away and sat down.

I opened my medical dictionary. Reams and reams of medical vocabulary in four languages. I tried to read a page every night before I went to sleep. "You ought to read something a little more steamy," Anna said to me once and threw a copy of 91/2 Weeks onto my duvet. "Read it," she said. "You might learn something." I read it. I learned and we laughed about it. That was before Mischa's ulcers.

The Liverpudlian was going at it fifty to the dozen, leaning back in his chair, his feet up against the desk, one toe poking through a hole in a grubby sock. He sounded to the untrained ear as if he were translating fluently. It was only the initiated who would have realized he was ill-prepared and making mistake after mistake.

I ran my eyes over the conference documentation. However well you prepared yourself, however many hundreds of words you learned in readiness for a medical conference there was always a phrase that would trip you up. But I had a head start. My father was a doctor and the names of drugs and illnesses had been the vocabulary of my youth. "Dad," I had said, the night before on the phone from New York to London, "Dad, can you explain to me a bit about viruses?"

He had laughed and said, "That's like me asking you to teach me Italian in a phone call. Look, fax me the documents and I'll try to explain things to you in context."

"I can't," I said.

"You can't?"

"You know this stuff is always confidential."

"I'm your father," he said. "If you want help you'll just have to trust me."

"I'll think about it, Dad," I said.

I didn't fax the documents. I stood in my apartment with my finger on the green start button of the fax machine, about to transmit, and changed my mind. "Confidentiality," screamed the Interpreting School director in my head. "Confidentiality. Break your vow of confidentiality, get caught, and you are out. Your vows are as solemn as the Hippocratic oath, as sacred as the nun's marriage to Jesus. What you learn in that booth must stay there or else your career is at an end."

I could hear the Liverpudlian getting a little out of breath. I tapped lightly on the desk in front of me, caught his attention and raised my eyebrows. We interpreters quickly learned the nonverbal code, the language which we speak while we are talking. The raised eyebrows meant, "Are you struggling? Shall I take over?" He shook his head. There was a certain shame in handing the microphone to a colleague before your stint was over. It was like ending a sprint before you reached the finish line. He made it, panting to the last word. The audience applauded the speaker. The Liverpudlian switched off his microphone and spluttered into his gray handkerchief. I felt repulsed.

The chairman stood up to make the closing remarks for the day. I was on. Mike on. Headphones. "Focus, Dominique, focus." Miss a word and you have missed the train. It had been a long day. I was tense and tired. My colleague shoved a note under my nose. "I'm off," it read. Against the rules to leave me there alone, even if it was the last speech, but I didn't care. I gave him the thumbs-up sign and he was gone. I was more relaxed with him out of the way. The words tumbled out of me. I was spurred on by the finish line. "Ladies and gentlemen, I think you'll agree we should also say thank you to our team of interpreters. They've done an excellent job and it's been a grueling day."

I leaned back exhausted. I always found it amusing and slightly embarrassing when I had to translate praise about my own work.

I should have felt nothing but relief. The day was over. Thousands of words had flowed through me into thin air. My grotty, spotty colleague was gone. I ought to have walked out of there with a spring in my step. I ought to have rushed out into the streets of Manhattan. Instead I sat very still in the corner of my booth and waited for the delegates to file out as they had filed in. I could see no one but still I felt as though I were not alone in the room. My headphones were on the desk in front of me. I heard faint voices coming from them. I picked them up. There were clearly still two or more people in the room talking. One of them had forgotten to switch off their microphone. I could hear them speaking in hushed tones, but I couldn't see them. Part of the hall was out of my line of vision. I reached for the control panel. I turned up the volume and held the headset to one ear.

". . . quite by chance," said a deep male voice with a Southern drawl.

"You don't stumble on these things by chance," said an older voice and coughed a smoker's cough.

"They did with penicillin."

"Billions of dollars are invested . . ." for a moment my headphones crackled, ". . . HIV every year, my young friend. No one, not even he, could find a quasi-cure by chance. Anyway, what makes you think it could work?"

I stiffened.

"The other day. In his lab I saw it for myself. Cells that should have been riddled with the disease holding their own. Couldn't believe my eyes."

"And he's told no one?"

"No, just me. He's a loner. I think I'm his only confidant."

"And you reckon he's credible? Worth backing?"

"I reckon he's a genius. But modest with it. Never brags. I can't say it's conclusive, but I'm damn sure he's onto something. I think he'll be persuaded to come with us."

I started to shake, sitting there trapped in that booth. A little at first. Then harder. I was afraid they would feel the vibrations of my movements. Mischa, I thought. The ulcers. The swallowing. The wasting away. There's a way out. These voices in my ears, they have the answer.

I was thinking so loudly, I almost forgot to listen.

"Follow his progress," said the older, smoker's voice. "And for God's sake make sure he keeps it under wraps till we get our act together and we can bring him on board. Land me this one and I'll back you to the hilt."

"Trust me," said the deep Southern voice and laughed a deep and heavy laugh.

The conversation stopped abruptly. Someone had switched off the microphone. I dug my nails into my palms and waited. I heard movement. I shoved my papers into my briefcase. I crept out of the booth, I walked out of the side door, I burst into a run along Lexington Avenue. I ran and I ran, past Fifty-third Street, Fifty-second, left on to Fifty-first, past Third Avenue, Second, First, into Beekman Place, shouting to myself, "Anna, Anna, tell Mischa, there might be a way!" I rushed past the doorman and pounded up the stairs to my apartment. I went straight for the telephone on the kitchen wall beside the fridge. I dialed Anna's number from memory and suddenly I froze. A voice in my head was screaming at me. "Your vows of confidentiality are as solemn as the Hippocratic oath. As sacred as the nun's marriage to Jesus."

Chapter Two: Nicholas

I knew Dominique's voice long before I knew Dominique. I knew all their voices, in fact, for some time before I considered them as human beings. During those long hours, sitting listening to them translating from languages of which I knew little, I was entirely reliant on the skills of the interpreters. And yet for weeks I thought of them as no more than translating machines. When one of them stuttered or stammered, floundered or faltered, I fiddled with my control panel as one would with the buttons on a radio. The superhuman efforts behind the sounds that entered my ears and those of the other doctors and researchers never crossed my mind. They were no more than groupings of English, French, Italian, Spanish, or German sounds passing through channels one, two, three, four, and five, providing a service and reverberating in my headphones. Sounds that could be summoned with a flick of a switch and dismissed with the same. Now that I can begin to understand the cerebral dexterity required to listen, to absorb, to speak, and to convey meaning all at once, I still feel somewhat guilty at my one-time lack of appreciation of the interpreters.

These in-house international conferences organized by Landmark, my pharmaceutical company, though sometimes dull, provided relief from my otherwise solitary working life. At times I was happy to banter with colleagues during coffee breaks. At others I wished myself back in my white coat and mask in the laboratory poring over colored liquids in test tubes on white laminated surfaces, or peering at cells through microscopes. Within the sterile walls of my working environment I might have been anywhere. The buzz of Manhattan in no way penetrated the characterless Sixties building in which I worked, and I was so far removed from the reality of the outside world that often when I ventured out on to Lexington at the end of a day, squinting in the sunlight or bracing myself against the biting air, I felt as though, in those paces between the laboratory and the street, I had traveled between one country and another with no journey in between.

I had been in Manhattan for six months by the time I first heard Dominique's voice. It was some time after that that I first met Dominique. She and the words she spoke in the booth had little to do with one another.

I had been transferred from the Florence branch of Landmark to New York, to continue my research on pediatric leukemia, surrounded by some of the world's leading scientists. I could pretend that my motives were entirely altruistic, but that would be a lie. And in all of this I would like to try at least to be honest with myself, though I am not sure quite how well I will succeed. Though I was driven by vocation, that of course was just a part of it. I was fired too by the passion of discovery in my field. At times I even felt a fraud being paid for this work, for lost in the world of experimentation I was little different from the gawky adolescent working on wooden benches in the school laboratory in Florence.

But though to experiment was the very essence of my work, unlike Dominique I had never felt a burning need to travel, to experience different lifestyles or cultures. I did not seek adventure outside the laboratory, but adventure it seems, sought me. "Manzini," he called. "Manzini come here a moment." Grevi, my boss at Landmark, where I was working in Florence before my transfer to New York, had summoned me. "Manzini," he called through the open door of his office. "I am waiting."

I walked in and stood squarely in front of him. I had worked under Grevi for eighteen months, since I had changed my path from pediatrician to researcher, but all that I knew of him had been learned from others. He had lost his wife to liver cancer. He had lost his child to some cult or other and he had grown ever more steely. Now he sat behind his chrome desk, fingering the silver mustache that he must surely have waxed at the tips, and he said, "Manzini, I'm sending you to New York. You will continue your research there and you will meet eminent scientists from all over the world. How soon can you leave?"

I said nothing and he allowed me no time for his words to sink in. "Manzini," he said, "you are wasting my time standing here mute and idle in my place of work. Kindly say something or leave."

"I would like some time to think about it," I said.

"You have till 8:30 tomorrow morning. And remember you are not irreplaceable. There are plenty of doctors who would die for this opportunity. And if you do deign to take this position, Nicholas, don't get big ideas about yourself. Remember to stick to the task at hand."

I turned to leave, angered as ever by his autocratic ways. Grevi rarely offered either praise or criticism and it was only by dint of the fact that I remained his employee that I could assume he was satisfied with my work. When I had proposed tracing the immune systems and the genetic backgrounds of a sample of newborn babies, to ascertain which were more prone to disease, he had immediately agreed to my suggestion. When the findings of my studies tracing the first six months of the lives of the infants had proved interesting and presented us with new hypotheses, he had registered them, logged them, and spoken about them in public. But he had never openly acknowledged my achievements, and I cannot pretend that this lack of recognition did not leave me feeling aggrieved.

Walking home that evening along the Arno, I felt a wave of resentment well up in me. Grevi was practically ordering my transfer to another continent. He had not so much as entertained the idea that I might have a private life in Florence that I was loath to leave behind. In my anger I did not stop to consider that he was vested with remarkable powers of intuition.

In all of our lives there is a before and an after. A time before which you would almost certainly have behaved in one way and after which you could never again react with such fluidity, such naïveté. My B.C. and my A.D. were before and after Dominique. Before, decisions came with very little angst. Afterward, that changed.

And so on the way home from my encounter with Grevi that night, practically wading through the conkers and the autumn leaves, but still comfortably warm in my shirtsleeves, I allowed my decision to come upon me. I loved Florence and I knew its every crumbly nook and cranny. And, dwarfed on either side by the sandy, rusty buildings of the Renaissance, their colors mirroring the leaves in the fading sunlight, I loved it with an added poignancy. I loved it as I had loved the newborn babies when I was about to make the decision to move from pediatrics to research. I loved it especially when summer was over and we, the Florentines, reclaimed its narrow pavements from the jostling tourists. Then, during the little spare time I had, I would stroll through the narrow backstreets, dropping into a bar to drink an espresso at the counter and chat, or to sip a cappuccino in a dark corner, depending on my mood.

That evening I wandered for hours through Florence. If my wanderings were in search of a decision, it can have been no more than a subconscious one. I went first to the Red Bar on the corner of Via Tornabuoni. Everything was bright red. The high leather stools. The counters. The waitress's lipstick. "Un doppio espresso," I said.

"Certo, dottore," she said, and pouted her scarlet lips. Maria, since I had known her, had experienced all sorts of innocuous symptoms that necessitated an examination. Her chest was raw, the small of her back was aching, her ear was throbbing, and all of her ailments appeared remarkably close to erogenous zones. Knowing that she was too short of cash to make frequent trips to the doctor and reluctant to acknowledge my suspicions as to the cause of her symptoms, I would examine her in the tiny dark office at the back of the bar, making sure that the door was ajar. "Sei carino, dottore," she would repeat again and again. The word carino means both kind and sexually appealing.

When Maria's ailments became ever more frequent I made sure I slipped my "friend" Carla into the conversation from time to time, and on occasions after work I asked Carla to join me at the Red Bar. Though Maria looked put out, her pains became increasingly infrequent.

"Carla non viene stasera?" . . . "Carla is not coming tonight?" she asked, looking hopeful. I explained to Maria that I was on my way to meet her. I watched her face fall, drank my espresso from the chunky little red cup, and left. From there through the backstreets, past the massive impressive red-roofed Duomo into a tiny crumbling piazza, where at the far end I pushed open a heavy wooden church door and crept to the altar in the darkness that was broken only by the flickering of three candles. I did not pray, for I am not religious and I think or at least I used to think that prayer was pointless if you didn't have belief, but I stood in contemplation in the stillness for a few moments. A woman in a pew a few rows behind me began to sob softly, breaking my reverie, and I turned to leave.

Out of the church into dusk, I walked past the stone carvings with their dead eyes, past shopkeepers closing their shutters and restaurateurs opening their doors. I walked and I walked, up the thin white marble steps of the Uffizi, through the revolving glass doors. At the entrance I showed my doctor's pass and handed over my 1,000 lire. The woman behind the counter handed me a set of black headphones attached to a black box, and explained that I could listen to a guided tour in the language of my choice. Channel 1 English, Channel 2 French, Channel 3 Italian, Channel 4 German and for some strange reason I turned to the English. I wandered through the wide halls with their mosaic floors, listening to a posh man with a radio-style voice talking about the Uffizi Gallery and its treasures, about da Vinci and Donatello, about Titian and Tintoretto, and I stopped in front of a copy of Michelangelo's Creation, so that the posh man could explain the painting with those two cracked fingers straining to touch one another.

It was not high season and the corridors were unusually quiet, but still a number of unmistakably American tourists were visiting the museum. Perhaps I had come to see how I would feel among them, to reach my decision, albeit subconsciously, about a change of country and of language. Only when an attendant tapped me on the arm, mouthing something at me, her voice drowned out by the taped voice of the guide, did I realize that the museum was about to close its doors.

Down the steps into the velvety blackness of the night, I made my way to Carla's house. I have mentioned her only briefly, because though we were friends and lovers I cannot honestly say we were soul mates or indispensable in each other's lives. And so on that evening I hurried through the narrow doorway, up the four flights of rotting steps to her front door. I knocked five times, the signal that it was me and it was safe to open up. She came to the door in her red kimono with her white-blond hair loosely tied back. She kissed me distractedly on the lips and began immediately to talk and to talk, telling me about her day at the hospital, about the anesthetic that had gone horribly wrong, the five-year-old child who had to be resuscitated, and the panic in the theater. On and on, reminding me why I had been unable to detach myself emotionally and had finally decided to take a break from pediatrics. On and on she went, her chin in her hands, her elbows propped on the kitchen table. Talking and talking, not really caring if I was listening, and when she had finished I said what I was unaware that I had come to say. "Carla," I said. "I am leaving Florence. I'm moving to New York."

Copyright (c) 2001 by Suzanne Glass All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Suzanne Glass worked for five years as a simultaneous interpreter, and then relaxed by pursuing a graduate degree in journalism. After living in various cities around the world, she now resides in London and writes a regular column called "The Looking Glass" for the Financial Times. Her well-received first novel, The Interpreter, concerns a woman finding her own voice after being the voice of others.

It was a January/February 2001 Book Sense 76 Pick - "A moral dilemma awaits Dominique, a simultaneous interpreter, and Nicholas, a young physician turned researcher, in this novel set in contemporary New York. Told in alternating chapters, this beautiful and insightful novel moves towards a very powerful finish."
- Penny McConnel, The Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT

The Interpreter

Suzanne Glass on Interpreting

Search for Suzanne Glass' books on BookSense.com

Top

Contact Us | Security & Privacy | Copyright