Here we have—finally?—a translator tempted to kill his author: a Hide-behind ready to do the deed. As for my own vengeance, I do not require a handgun, or any weapon for cutting or thrusting, but instead a regular, obstinate growth, singularly shielded from any judiciary pursuit, a slow climb—not of water, nor of adrenaline, nor of desire, but of lines—a discreet invasion that will necessarily provoke the fury of the wronged writer, expelled from his living space. (Killer’s Darkness)
The wheels are in motion. The virus works its way through the machine, like a rat.
Z
*
* The term Kiwi was used during WWI to designate the soldiers in the US Air Force who didn’t fly. This word corresponds more or less with what French pilots call the rampants. David Grey thinks of William Faulkner, known for his juvenile passion for flying and the brazen lies concerning his supposed exploits as a WWI pilot: contrary to his bragging, the author of Soldiers’ Pay never piloted a single military plane and remained a Kiwi.
A brief aeronautic commentary: the image of the plane tracing its graceful arabesques through the serene sky seems to obsess David. I suspect the American translator envisages a low-altitude machine-gunning of Prote or a proper bombardment of his posts. When I furnished Grey with a few additional arms, I forgot to include in my panoply those fatal Easter eggs and metallic hailstones that fall from the sky without warning, accompanied, a fraction of a second after impact, by a terrifying howl of engines launched at full speed when—memory of reels of news bulletins from WWII—the German Stukas or the Japanese Zeros burst forth from the sun and head straight for the parade of unlucky refugees who immediately dive toward the side of the road. Grey, who loves the cinema and aviation, lets himself be invaded by these images in a daze. Replacing Prote, not only in relation to Doris, but also on the page, visibly tempts him. Tired of being the mere prosthesis of his French author, he would like to feel the powerful sensations of flight or acrobatic eroticism, to chase Prote from his cockpit, wrest the control stick, the pen, and the beautiful brunette from his hands at the same time. Yielding to the confusion of his effervescent spirit, he imagines assaulting his author in an air attack.
For David Grey, my kindred spirit, my brother, finds himself as irritated as me by this hierarchical division of space: above the horizon line, the impervious page is an empty sky, tarnished by a mosquito or a fly that soon comes to life; Grey and I remain pitifully nailed to the ground, vulgar Kiwis deprived of flight, while my author and his author—my mosquito, his fly—buzz freely up above in graceful whirls while evoking oh!s and ah!s from the crowd of delighted spectators. But they don’t suspect, those naïve men, those ignoramuses, those space cases, those naïve compatriots, that it’s me (or Grey) who is flying the plane, who is making the spectacle happen. He and I who pedal in sync at the back of the cabin smeared with oil and grease, spinning the propeller and keeping the old crate in the air! He and I who, hidden among the sheet metal and the clouds, work the controls with our tense arms, crippled with painful cramps, in order to maneuver that winged puppet! For a moment, it was as if there was no pilot on the plane other than me, or him … For a moment, we believed … But of course it’s a deceptive illusion, we are nothing more than servile copilots, subordinates obedient to the orders from the control tower, to the directives of the conductor, faithfully playing the score, following his instructions to the letter, performing with ardor or reserve, nostalgia or enthusiasm, enacting the roles created by another for the enjoyment of the audience.
The aerial attack born from David Grey’s overexcited imagination suffers nevertheless from a major handicap: despite his passion for flying machines, the American translator doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fly a plane. (Flight of the Bumblebee)
*
* So David chose another angle of attack, another weapon: the computer virus, signaled in a relatively clear message signed “Z” on Prote’s computer screen. An ersatz for the dreamed aerial attack, an economical consolation prize: rather than concentrating his efforts on the immensity of the sky and taking flying lesson, to carry out his heinous crime like other notorious evildoers, David makes do with that rigid plastic box swarming with 0s and 1s, clumped together in morphing constellations, in mathematical throngs organized with all the geometric precision of the nocturnal summer sky. Like an interplanetary probe with precise movements and programmed noxiousness, the frisky virus of a numerical galaxy with clusters of neighboring bytes, rigorously tearing through entire sections, extinguishing gigantic swaths of binary material, in a single vengeful flap of the wing annihilating planets, rings, asteroids and satellites, entire solar systems, white dwarfs and supernovas, plunging stellar memory into an unknown chaos, a new night.
“The damage is done. The virus works its way through the machine, like a rat. Z.” At first Prote took these few words for a stupid joke, the mere provocation of an intruder after breaking and entering the Normandy cottage where Prote has his office. The crowbar abandoned near the white door testifies to the presence of a criminal. The cottage had a visitor … But given the lack of any vandalism or any immediately identifiable theft, Prote quickly forgets the incident, puts the door back in place, sits at his desk, lights a Lucky Strike, and, already absorbed in the new chapter of his novel-in-progress, starts tapping away on his keyboard. Soon, however, the French writer is in the grips of doubt, skepticism, then consternation, finally anger: his words, his lines, dialogues, paragraphs, chapters, are inexorably eroded, sometimes a few characters, sometimes several syllables, or entire phrases, disappear without explanation, in an entirely random and incomprehensible manner, sucked up by the chasm of the screen like the stars of the universe in a powerful black hole, each destruction accompanied by a little melodious and exasperating pfuiit.
What to do? What defense to mount? Who to suspect? Who benefits from this crime? Do I have a mortal enemy, wonders Prote, who, rather than directly attacking my person or my published books, chose to lash out at my work in progress? Could I possibly suspect my little Doris, so devoted? Ah, I can’t stand these mocking pfuiits! It’s like the muted detonation of a pistol equipped with a silencer, whose every bullet destroys a few thousand characters of my novel. No, Doris is too loyal, too loving and helpful. It could be anyone, but not my dear Doris. Perhaps she has already received my letter in America. Perhaps she is writing back to me at this very moment … It’s more likely my concierge, the postman, my grouchy neighbor, the bad-tempered butcher, one of my former mistresses or wives, my cleaning lady bribed by a prankster, or it could even be my American translator with the drab name, Grey, that’s it, David Grey. But no, I can’t really imagine them slowly shooting my computer’s memory full of holes, inflicting an electronic Alzheimer’s. My Hungarian translator perhaps, Stefan Esterházy? Impossible: we hardly know each other. It could be that seductive Italian, Pietro Listo, who Doris found rather charming and cajoling, but whom I deemed effeminate and hardly straightforward, perhaps an opportunist prepared to do anything to translate my next book? No, that’s not realistic. But then who? First things first, let’s shut down this nasty ruse.
So, from Prote’s inferior point of view, the book is a can of worms, a haystack in which he has lost the precious needle of his text. It is now riddled with a virus of unknown origin. For the moment, Prote remains in the dark with his anger and speculations. (Tamperer’s Night)
*
* My author digresses, I follow his lead. We might consider Scattered Figments, my American author’s second novel, to be the first draft of Translator’s Revenge, a kind of groping version of the book that I am translating,