The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (26 page)

I couldn’t help it. I admired her. She looked the part of Elvira Montalban so much better than I ever could, me with my wild Irish hair and freckles, with my working-class fears of making a social faux-pas. Maria-Elvira looked Spanish, she looked intellectual, she looked like a writer.

Stop it! I told myself. Elvira Montalban is your creation. This Maria Escobar is nothing but an opportunist.

I handed her my menu without speaking.

“The
menu del día
is very good here,” she said, without looking at the menu. “Unless you prefer tripe or brains.”

I shook my head. She gestured confidently to the waiter and gave him our order, two
cocidos
, then turned to me with a slight smile that showed her rather large teeth.

I found that I was almost intimidated by her. In Paris, she’d had the look of a displaced person, marginalized by history and geography. She had spoken softly and timidly to the cafe waiter and had cringed when he turned his back on her. She had seemed to me one of those people in the world who have been hurt rather badly, and in many different ways, so that they do not spring back.

Now she did not shrink. Now she took up space.

“Not many of these old places left,” she said conversationally. She took out a pack of cigarettes, offered them to me, and then lit up. She hadn’t smoked before, but now she seemed to luxuriate in it. She poured wine from the carafe and took a drink. Then she called the waiter over and ordered a better bottle.

“How long have you been in Madrid?” I asked her grudgingly.

“Oh, about two years, perhaps. I stayed on in Paris for a while, but of course I was really dying there, I see that now. I thought at first I was homesick, so I decided to go back to Buenos Aires. But naturally, once I got there, after twenty years away, I realized that everything had changed and I had no place there anymore. I spent about six unhappy months, and then decided to come to Madrid, and to do what I’d always wanted to do, which was to write. Of course, my stay in Argentina was very useful in that it put me in mind of old familiar places, and especially a kind of mood I wanted for my book.”

Cocido
is usually served in three courses. The first of these, a rich broth with a little rice, now arrived. I thought, This woman must be a schizophrenic. She’s actually convinced herself that she’s Elvira Montalban. She sounds like she’s giving an interview to a newspaper.

“And you, Cassandra,” she said, sipping her broth appreciatively. “What have you been up to? Still travelling as much as ever? You were off to Mozambique then as I recall.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Still travelling. That is, when I’m not writing.”

“So you’re writing too?” No, she wasn’t insane. There was a twinkle in her eye. As if this were all a joke.

“You know perfectly well what I’ve been writing.”

“I don’t, really,” she answered, dabbing gently at the corners of her mouth. “Is it something based on your experiences, or did you borrow someone else’s?”

Just then a couple of men, middle-aged, genial, expensively suited, entered the restaurant. Maria-Elvira waved them over. They all kissed and then she introduced them to me.

“My publisher,” she said, “and my editor. This is Cassandra Reilly. She translated my book into English.”

“Ah, yes, an unusual case,” said the publisher. “It’s not often where the translation comes out before the original.”

“I’d tried many publishing houses and had been turned down,” said Maria-Elvira sweetly. “Without the book’s success in England and America, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have had a chance in Spain.”

“Well, the novel never crossed
my
desk,” said the editor. “I’m sure I would have noticed it.”

They settled at a table in the corner, out of earshot. The second course of the
cocido
arrived: chickpeas, with the vegetables from the stew, cabbage, leeks, onions, turnips. Maria-Elvira attacked it with relish.

“You set this up, didn’t you?” I said. “Suggesting we meet at the restaurant where you know they always eat. It wasn’t coincidental.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Maria-Elvira said. “Now where were we? Your writing? Yes. You were telling me where you get your ideas.”

“You stole my book,” I said. “You’re not Elvira Montalban. You’re Maria Escobar.”

“You stole my life.”

“I made the stories up. They’re not realistic. They’re fantastical.”

“You took my stories about my preparatory school and about my teachers, and you turned them into something else. You put the school in the future, and let the snow fall and gave it a fancy name. But it’s my life. You captured my life perfectly.”

“Living a life is not the same as writing about it,” I said, but I faltered slightly.

“That chapter where the girl from the happy family sees her parents dragged off by the militia? That conversation in the interrogation chamber? That clandestine love affair between the powerful professor and the young student? I could name several more, many more scenes that were just as I told you. Didn’t I tell you too about my terribly sad marriage to the Icelander and those dreadful winters we passed in Reykjavík, hardly speaking while the snow fell on and on? Didn’t I?”

Her voice sounded so familiar to me. As if it were an inner voice of mine made visible. As if the cadences of her speech were something I’d written down from dictation.

The waiter asked me if I’d finished my second course. I’d hardly touched it, though Maria-Elvira had finished hers. He brought the third and final plate: a pile of meat—beef, chorizo, blood sausage, some bits of unidentified organs and, poking out from the middle of the pile, a pig’s trotter.

Instead of tackling it immediately, as she had the other two courses, Maria-Elvira brought out a pile of papers from her bag. “You see, I’ve already been writing my second novel. The publisher has accepted it. It will be published next year.”

“You can’t do that. You’re not Elvira. I’m Elvira.”

“Have you written anything more by Elvira Montalban?”

I had to admit that no, I had not.

“Because you have nothing to say. You have no stories to tell, now that you have used up mine. But I still have stories to tell.”

I opened my mouth, but stopped. My story was that of an Irish-Catholic girl from Kalamazoo. I had been inventing myself as a traveller and translator since I left home. I had no stories that I wanted to tell, no stories that were either true or literary, no stories I thought anyone would want to hear.

Now Maria-Elvira began to eat, and gestured to me to join her. “I’ve always found this dish so curious, how it’s served. Separating all the parts out, the broth, the vegetables, the meat. It’s quite a metaphor, don’t you think? My ideas were the broth, nourishing but thin; your translation the vegetables, good but not filling. And my final version is the meat, chewy, spicy, substantial.”

“You call it a final version. You don’t call it a translation?”

“They were my words to start out with and now they’re my words again. You will never write another book, Cassandra Reilly, but I will write a dozen more. I’m a writer now. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened.”

“I know how it happened,” I began, but in truth I didn’t know. The process from nobody to novelist was just as mysterious to me as it had ever been.

The editor and publisher came over again. “I was just telling Cassandra about my next book,” said Maria-Elvira, patting the manuscript beside her.

“It’s quite brilliant from what I’ve seen,” said the editor. “We expect it to have an even greater success than
La academia de la melancholía
.”

“Now all we need is title,” said the publisher. “Has anything come to you yet?”

“Yes,” said Maria-Elvira. She pushed her plate away. All that was left of the meat course was the bones. “I’m thinking of calling it simply
The Translator
.”

I started.

“Because that’s really what it’s about, my years of translation.”

“
The Translator
,” said the editor. “Plain and yet evocative.”

“I like it too,” said the publisher, turning to me, “Have you and Elvira already begun the translation process?”

“Yes,” said Maria-Elvira quickly. “I wouldn’t have anyone else. Because Cassandra understands the craft extremely well. She understands it’s not just the art of substituting words for other words. It’s a form of writing in itself. What one might call—a collaboration.”

Pendergast wasn’t pleased of course, but Jane Farquharson took the long view, especially after she received a charming letter from Elvira Montalban explaining the reasons for the secrecy. She told Jane that she would be happy to give her new novel to Farquharson and Pendergast on the condition that I, Cassandra, remain her translator. Along with the letter she sent a box of hothouse flowers.

And that’s how I became the translator of, or rather, the collaborator of, Elvira Montalban, the author to whom Luisa Montiflores is often compared these days, the comparison, of course, highly favoring Elvira.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Cassandra Reilly Mysteries

The transcendent music is that of the asylums. There are four of them, made up of illegitimate and orphaned girls whose parents are not in a position to raise them. They are brought up at the expense of the state and trained solely to excel in music. Moreover, they sing like angels and play the violin, the flute, the organ, the oboe, the cello and the bassoon; in short, there is no instrument, however unwieldy, that can frighten them. They are cloistered like nuns. It is they alone who perform, and about forty girls take part in each concert. I vow to you that there is nothing so diverting as the sight of a young and pretty nun in white habit, with a bunch of pomegranate blossoms over her ear, conducting the orchestra and beating time with all the grace and precision imaginable.

—Charles de Brosses

an eighteenth-century visitor to Venice

I
T BEGAN SIMPLY,
a malicious prank or a robbery pinned on the wrong person, nothing to take too seriously.

It began with the disappearance of a musical instrument.

“But why would you even want another bassoon, Nicky? You already have four.”

My friend Nicola Gibbons was calling me from Venice. She’d left London just four days ago to attend a symposium on women musicians of Vivaldi’s time. If she’d had a lesser voice, I would have hardly been able to hear her. For it was an evening in late October and a violent wind knocked tree limbs against the house and sent dustbin lids spinning. A thin rain spat and spewed.

“Of course I didn’t
take
the bloody bassoon, Cassandra, but the fact is, it’s gone missing while supposedly in my possession, and it’s a period piece, priceless and irreplaceable, and I’m apparently responsible.”

I repressed a sigh. Why was she calling
me
? I couldn’t exactly tell her that she was interrupting a very pleasant evening, one that I very much deserved after the trip I’d just made. Since I travel constantly and keep my attic room at Nicky’s house in London only as a base, I had been thrilled to find myself arriving as she was leaving, and to discover that I was quite alone in her house, with the prospect of a week to enjoy her good wines, her library and her specially made large bathtub.

“But they’re not planning to put you in jail or anything, are they?” I interrupted her, hoping she would come to the point.

“No, I’m not really even under arrest. But the police have searched my room several times and questioned me pretty thoroughly and now they’re telling me I can’t leave the country, or else I really will be arrested. They took my passport.”

I had the electric fire on and a small whisky on the coffee table. I took a sip, and then another as Nicky ranted on, and flipped through a magazine on my lap. Beside me on the sofa sat a pile of books in Spanish. I was supposed to review them for an editor at a large London publishing house. I’d picked them up from Simon earlier today.

“Most of them are just literary novels,” Simon had sighed. “But here’s one that looks promising. It’s by a protégé of Gloria de los Angeles. It was described to me at the Frankfurt Book Fair as ‘the erotic and spiritual struggles of a group of eighteenth-century Venezuelan nuns.’”

I’d put
Lovers and Virgins
on top of the pile, along with a book called
Bashō in Lima
, which seemed to be about a woman of Japanese-Peruvian descent making a pilgrimage back to Peru. The other novels had less riveting covers, and one, at least, was about Latin American politics. “I hate to be an unfeeling Philistine,” Simon had said, “but these books about military coups and disappeared people don’t sell anymore. Sexy nuns, well, that’s another story. Let me have your reports in a couple of weeks, darling.”

It felt good to be back to some sort of work, and good to be back in London. I had just returned from an unfortunate excursion to several of the more distant tropical islands with a naturalist who was studying turtle migration. Although charming, Angela had been rather more scientific than amorous and while I had learned a great deal about turtles, I’d also badly bruised my hip after stumbling over some rocks along the shore. Not only had the fall put me out of temper, it had also caused me to crush some extremely rare turtle eggs, putting Angela out of temper with me as well.