Crow the aesthète

I. Maryvonne

I became a student at the school for translators and interpreters in Paris because I thought it would be easier than the doctoral thesis I had abandoned. My languages were English and French; neither Danish, my native language, nor Swedish, which I also knew, was part of the school’s curriculum. Had my German been better, I might’ve had an easier time as one of the three-language students, translating into my native tongue but never out of it. (Those who only had two viable languages had to translate in both directions.) To an outsider, working with two languages might seem easier than working with three, but it’s always easier to translate towards the language one knows best than away from it.

There were two others like me: Maryvonne, a Frenchwoman in her late sixties - by far the oldest student at the school - and René, who had grown up in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Léman and in the French commuter town of Annemasse. (His father was a career diplomat.) He spoke French and English with equal proficiency, his English devoid of the telltale French inflections, the English of a French-speaker educated at an international lycée. He would have been at home among the Anglophones or among the Francophones, though I saw him with neither group. Mostly he kept to himself, and my few attempts at conversation had met with such blank unresponsiveness that I had soon given up. Maryvonne, on the other hand, I ended up befriending - if such a word could be used to describe what happened - during those first weeks when it seemed to me that we were always running into one another. Otherwise, we had nothing in common, or so I thought. From the start, she addressed me in English, and though it was clear to me that my French was better, I went along and answered her in kind. Her English was nothing like René’s, an English learned in France, with frequent cognates and the occasional false friend. Every morning, I would see her walking ahead of me as I emerged from the subway; every evening I would spot her at the other end of the platform, and after some hesitation, I slowly made my way over to her. That was how we came to be study partners. In the train, we often had to stand because all the seats were taken, her face so close to mine in the crowded car that I was able to make out the little hairs above her upper lip as I tried not to press up against her. She always got off before me, at Étoile, where four subway lines intersected, which meant that she could be going to any part of the city. I could have asked her where she lived, but I never did.

I had no idea what had made Maryvonne decide to become a translator at this point in her life, but I had only to observe her, matter of fact and businesslike in Fauchier-Delavigne’s class (where we translated from English to French) but timid and hesitant in Michaels’ (where we translated from French to English), as a rule deferring to the Anglophones in matters of grammar, to see that I was much the same, albeit the other way around: faltering in front of Fauchier-Delavigne, more at my ease with Michaels. It was perhaps only logical, and inevitable, that a partnership should form between us. We spent a lot of time in the school’s bibliothèque, modest even by French-university standards and usually empty, especially since the computer posts were in another room. Sometimes, an entire afternoon could go by without another student coming in. At a table in the corner, we would work on our assignments together, articles from Le Monde or The Times that we translated from French to English and from English to French in preparation for the next exam, where we wouldn’t be able to use the dictionaries we had lying open around us. I once tried asking Maryvonne about her reasons for studying translation at the school of translators and interpreters. Right away, I sensed her ready to change the subject, as she leafed slowly through the dictionary in front of her, first in one direction, then in the other, like someone unable to decide what word to look up.

There are ghosts everywhere, she finally said. The whole city is filled with them. It’s become a giant cemetery. When I asked her what she meant, she looked around at the nearby shelves as though we might not be the only ones in the bibliothèque. A few days earlier, on the train, she had nodded silently at an empty corner of the otherwise packed car. It could have been a puddle of vomit or a dog dropping, but Maryvonne had said, A ghost. After that, whenever I noticed an inexplicable gap in a crowd or a mysteriously vacant seat on a bus, her words came back to me. She was a little like a ghost herself, carrying around an invisible burden, it seemed to me. I sensed a distant trauma from her youth responsible, somehow, for her presence here. Watching her make her way through a crowd of students less than half her age, I couldn’t help but notice how everyone in the corridor moved aside without a glance in her direction - like tightening the collar of a coat without bothering to verify the provenance of a chilly breeze.

Most of the time, we didn’t make small talk, concentrating on the work at hand, though once she asked me if everyone in Denmark spoke the way I did. And what way is that? I replied. My English, according to her, wasn’t like theirs. (She meant the Anglophones.) I seldom used slang and my pronunciation was very clean, very easy to understand. There was something rigid about my grammar, she concluded, and I wasn’t sure from her tone if she meant it as a compliment or not. For many Danes, English was like a second mother tongue, a faithful shadow, a watermark: I read in English more than in Danish, I watched more films in English, but on a daily basis it was Danish I spoke, not English. In the end, I told her that it was because English wasn’t really my language; it’s easier to be rigorous with a language that isn’t one’s own. I wasn’t sure if Maryvonne took my answer seriously. She wasn’t one to laugh at a joke, and I found it impossible to guess what she was thinking at a given moment. Nevertheless, I would commiserate with her when we received our exam results: in general, my French-to-English was as high as her English-to-French, her French-to-English as low as my English-to-French. It occurred to me that if we could somehow become a single person, we would be a force to be reckoned with. I told her this, smiling to let her know that it was meant in jest. She gave me one of her nameless looks, as though she felt sorry for me, and I immediately regretted my remark.

Of course, there was already someone like that: René, the diplomat’s son. He alone held his own in the company of both Michaels and Fauchier-Delavigne. Every bilingual has a language he favors, the way an ambidextrous person always has a weaker hand. But it was hard to tell with René. As one might expect, he did well on his exams, which two- and three-language students took together in the big auditorium. I would glance up from my paper to see him walking serenely past the rows of heads bent over desks, and I had the impression that, for him, the exams were a mere formality. They consisted of two 250-word articles, extracted from newspapers and reviews of recent date; we had just under an hour. A monitor stood behind a lectern and, in a show of vigilance, occasionally walked up and down the rows. But it was obvious to me that keeping watch over an auditorium full of students was difficult, if not impossible. Individual seating was left to our discretion, the rows of seats sharply graduated in concentric semi-circles around a "stage" where the monitor stood. Such an arrangement also gave me a view of the students in the rows below me. Each seat - bolted to the floor - did not quite line up with the seat in front, one level lower, due to the way the rows curved around each other, and I found that I could look down and glimpse an eraser, a hand gripping a pencil, an exam sheet partially obscured by a shoulder, and that, by leaning forward a little, ever so discreetly, I gained a better view. If I squinted a little, I could even make out some of the handwriting. How many others, through the years, had realized the same thing?

I have Maryvonne, or her presence in front of me, to thank for my little discovery. It was customary for the two of us to walk into the auditorium together, coming as we did from the bibliothèque where we did our last-minute revising before an exam. Naturally, we ended up choosing seats near one another. Sometimes Maryvonne sat behind me, other times I sat behind her. (We never sat next to one another in the same row because she found it distracting.) I did not set out to cheat; I simply wanted to see where she was on her copy. Any moment I expected her to turn around in her seat but she never so much as looked up from her exam. The idea of cheating did not enter my thoughts, or at least not right away. This wasn’t a mathematics or chemistry exam with correct and incorrect answers; we were being tested on the quality of our translations, and cribbing another student’s sentences would have been stupid, an admission of guilt. Nevertheless, I let myself glance at Maryvonne’s paper when I was stuck on a word (the French formulation of dandy roll, chives, fair trade), i.e. a small and easily definable unit of meaning, something that a glance inside a dictionary would have resolved in other circumstances, that is to say, anywhere outside the auditorium. I did well - better than on any of my previous exams, where, all too often, not knowing a word or the full meaning of an expression had undermined and compromised the rest of my translation. Not being hampered by vocabulary allowed me to concentrate on the text itself as a whole. Practicing translators - unlike, say, interpreters - would always have their dictionaries at hand, and to forbid their use during an exam was to emphasize unrealistic working conditions. Or that was how I justified it to myself. After all, no one else at the school had to work in two languages not his own; I was simply re-establishing the balance.

Mayrvonne congratulated me. I didn’t ask what she had scored on her French-to-English. It seemed more and more likely that she would not have her first year. I considered telling her about my discovery, but at the same time I feared her reaction. (I remembered her glaring disapprovingly at a group of students smoking in the common lounge, underneath the no-smoking sign.) She might very well forbid me from sitting behind her after that. In the end, I decided to keep it to myself. At the next exam, we entered the auditorium together as usual, and ever so subtly I let her fall ahead of me so that she would sit down first. Earlier, in the bibliothèque, she had been unusually subdued - even for her - but I chalked it up to nerves: this was, after all, the mid-semester exam. I stared at the back of her head, her silvery gray hair which she didn’t bother coloring like most women her age, and I experienced in that moment a flash of tenderness for her. If she only knew! That was when I saw René: he was sitting at the edge of one of the rows, and looked up as we approached. Our eyes met, but there was no change in his gaze: no way to tell if he had recognized me at all. In front of me, Maryvonne suddenly paused, then took the only empty seat in the row directly behind his. All of the nearby seats were taken. It had been so unexpected that I just stood there for a full second, staring down at Maryvonne, who was already busying herself with her little zippered case, the kind used by French schoolchildren for carrying pencils and erasers. Had she figured it out? But how? And why hadn’t she said anything? There was nothing else to do; with leaden steps, I continued up the aisle.

The next day, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to bring up what had happened, I tried to broach the matter as delicately as possible. But confronted with her blank, unwavering gaze I found myself hemming and hawing, fumbling for words, and it dawned on me that what she had done - at least on a basic level - was choose a seat because it was available. To dig any deeper was to risk exposing my own motives for bringing up the subject and open myself up to other questions that I wasn’t in any position to answer. A few days later, we were given our exam results, and Maryvonne received her highest score ever on her French-to-English. I, on the other hand, had done even worse than usual, on both my English-to-French and my French-to-English. I did my best to pretend I was happy for her, but the more I thought about it the angrier I became: at her, at myself, at the school. I caught up with Maryvonne after Michaels’ class - where, for once, she had been rather sure of herself - and I asked her, right there in the hallway. Or rather, I accused her. In any case, that was how it came out. I told her that I knew she had cheated on her last exam. Anyone walking past could have heard me, but she didn’t seem bothered in the least. Her face, calm as a mirror, betrayed nothing. She gazed steadily at me and asked why I thought that. I crossed my arms and replied that it wasn’t a matter of thinking it but of knowing it. She had fooled the others but not me. I went into detail about obliquely-angled seats, the discretion involved, until the pitying expression on her face made me falter. Finally I stopped talking altogether and walked away, leaving her standing there - a solitary figure in the corridor that a moment earlier had been full of students - not daring to look behind me before I had turned the corner and was safely out of sight.

I could have apologized, of course. She was pragmatic, if nothing else, and I like to think that she got as much out of our relationship as I did. Had we been more than classmates or study partners, I might have seen things differently, perhaps. I might have given more thought to her feelings. But there was no getting around the fact that I had just admitted my own guilt to her. In accusing her, I had only managed to accuse myself. What if she went to Michaels or Fauchier-Delavigne? What if she denounced me at the secrétariat? When she did neither, I began to avoid her. She seemed to take the hint and didn’t insist. We ignored one another in class and in the corridors. She didn’t sit behind René again, and he didn’t sit in front of her either. As for me, I made a point of sitting behind one of the Chinese students, to show her that I wasn’t cheating. My exam scores suffered, and the thought occurred to me that, all along, it should have been her and me sitting together. Not one of us behind the other but rather side by side, glancing at each other’s test when necessary, she at my French-to-English and I at her English-to-French. She was my dictionary and grammar as much as I was hers. It would have been the logical arrangement, a happy marriage of convenience. But things could never go back to what they had been. I had sought her out at the start of the year because I felt that it made sense, given our respective weaknesses. Deep inside, I had never liked the silent judgements, the reticence, the general lack of feeling. A part of me began to suspect that she hadn’t cheated on the exam at all and in some ways that made it worse: she had managed, without cheating, to get a good score on her French-to-English.

Alone, I studied more assiduously than ever before. Each new expression or word in French I noted diligently in a large Clairefontaine notebook. I read as much as I could, and always with a pencil in hand: a book I didn’t take notes on was a book I hadn’t really read, I told myself. My marks improved, though I feared it wasn’t enough to save me. One afternoon, in the bibliothèque - I tried to use it when I knew Maryvonne wouldn’t be there - René walked in and sat down at one of the tables. The entire time he did nothing but stare blankly at the wall. Or so it seemed to me. Then, just as suddenly, he stood up and walked out. In the auditorium, observing him from several rows away, I grew familiar with his exam-taking habits. He always took off his watch before he started, and every so often, he liked to pick his nose discreetly with the eraser end of his pencil. There was also a steady supply of sweets - gummy bears, usually, or a chocolate bar of some kind. He worked unhurriedly, methodically, rarely changing what he’d written. It was almost as though he wasn’t taking the same exam as the rest of us. Sometimes, on my way to hand in my copy, I would walk past his empty seat. The only trace of his presence was one or two crumpled candy wrappers on the desk.

(click on the image to buy the issue)