The Wrong Word

On the Wednesday we worked late because we were behind. That is the whole of the reason, and I have gone back over it several times looking for a better one, and there is not one. We were on page two hundred and eighty-eight. We had forty-seven days and twenty-three pages and a second pass and a chapter that did not exist, and at nine in the evening neither of us had said the word home.

There was also an email in my coat, in the sense that a thing is in your coat when you have read it four times and answered nothing. The press in Madrid wanted me for three events in the second week of February with Ximena Belda, whose last four novels I have put into English and who will not do these things alone. I had not mentioned it to Elodie, on the grounds that it was not yet a decision, which is a sentence I would like carved somewhere I can see it.

We were in the penultimate chapter. Nella’s sister is on the telephone to a cousin, and she delivers the verdict the whole book has been refusing to give, because Giulia Ferro would never let her main character say a thing a minor character could say worse.

Alla fine se n’è andato lui; ma era da due anni che in quella casa non c’era più nessuno da lasciare.

In the end he was the one who went; but for two years there had been nobody left in that house to leave.

Elodie read her draft out. She had he was the one who walked out.

“No,” I said.

“It’s nine words and a semicolon, Mateo. Which of them.”

“‘Walked out.’ It’s a verdict. Se n’è andato is a verb about a door. Yours is a verb about a character.”

“It is what the sister thinks.”

“It is what the sister thinks after the second clause. Before it she is describing a man leaving a building.” I put my pencil down. “And the second half is the only true thing anybody says about those two people in three hundred pages, and you have run at it with your coat on.”

She looked up then, and the room changed temperature in the way it does with her, without any voice being raised.

“It’s the word my mother uses,” she said.

“I am aware of the word your mother uses. She used it about me in my hearing, in a kitchen, in the September I moved out, and I sat there and let her.”

“Then don’t tell me it’s a verdict.”

“I am telling you it is your verdict, in an Italian woman’s mouth, on page two hundred and eighty-nine.”

“I would like you to stop translating the first half to protect yourself from the second.”

That is where it stopped being about the page. She put her pencil in the groove, which with her is not the end of an argument, it is a woman standing up.

“Say it in your own voice,” she said. “Whatever you’ve just said, say it without the page in front of you.”

So I did.

“Te fuiste tú primero.”

You left first.

· · ·Scene break

I said it in Spanish because in English I would have said it carefully.

That is the whole of it. I have lived in English since I was thirty. I chose it and I moved for it and I can do things in it that most people born to it cannot, and in a room with her I have never once been the person with the most words. In English I am careful. Careful is not a virtue. Careful is a limp.

She answered in Italian, which is what she does when she is not going to be managed, and for perhaps four minutes we conducted an argument in three languages, neither of us translating anything, both of us understanding all of it. She said I had left five years before I left. I said she had gone first and further. She said, in Italian, that I had spent two years in that flat behaving like a lodger with excellent manners, and I said, in Spanish, that she had spent them reading me the way she reads a text — for evidence, from a distance, with a pencil — and that it is a terrible thing to be understood by somebody who will not be in the room with you.

“In English,” she said.

“No.”

“Mateo. In English.”

“No. You get everything in English.” I had both hands on the desk. “Every argument of this marriage has been in your second language and my third, in your country, with your friends, about your work, and you have never once had to find a word slowly in front of me. I have done it four times a day for eleven years. You think I withheld. Half of what you call withholding was me standing in a kitchen in Edinburgh with the right sentence in Spanish and the wrong one in English, deciding which was less humiliating.”

“That is not the same thing and you know it is not the same thing.”

“It is not the same thing. It is also true.”

“You are the most articulate man I have ever met,” she said, “in any language, and you have used all of it to be pleasant. Don’t you dare give me the accent.”

And she was right, which is the part I want down on the page, because in the same minute she was about to be more wrong than I have ever heard her be.

“Yo no fui la que dejó,” she said.

Then she carried on, and I did not hear the rest of it.

“Say that again,” I said.

“I said I wasn’t the one who —“

“In Spanish. Say it in Spanish again.”

“Yo no fui la que dejó.” She said it slowly, the way you repeat a thing to a man who is being deliberately obtuse. “I was not the one who was left.”

“That is not what it says.”

“It is exactly what it —“

“La que dejó is the one who does the leaving,” I said. “La que dejaron is the one they left. You want the second and you have said the first, and you are not a woman who makes that mistake. You made it on a staircase in October too. Por yo. I have been carrying that one about since like a stone in a shoe. You cannot put yourself in the case of the person a thing is done to. You cannot do it in Spanish, you cannot do it in Italian, and in English you do it with the passive and a joke.”

Somebody in the flat above put something down.

“That,” Elodie said, in a voice with nothing in it at all, “is the cruellest thing anyone has said to me in my adult life, and I am going to have to keep it, because it is also accurate, and I do not get to have both.”

“Elodie —“

“Sit down. You are standing up like a man at a lectern.”

· · ·Scene break

What followed was the most honest conversation I have had since I was thirty-three. It lasted about two hours and nobody shouted in any of it.

I told her that I did not leave three years ago. I told her that I left five years ago, in a hospital corridor, standing up, in less time than it takes to read a paragraph, and then stayed in the flat for two more years doing the shopping and the tax return and the flowers for other people’s funerals.

She asked what happened in the corridor.

I said: “Tomorrow.”

She looked at me for a long moment and did not push, and I understood that she had had practice at not pushing recently, and I did not yet know how much.

She told me what her grief had looked like from the inside, which I had never asked for in five years: that she had built, in about a fortnight, a complete and accurate account of what had happened to us, with nothing left out, and had then spent five years reading it to herself in an empty room, because the only person qualified to hear it had gone quiet.

“I didn’t need you to say anything good,” she said. “That’s what I can’t make anybody understand. I needed you to say something bad. Anything at all with the wrong word in it.”

“I know.”

“You said ‘they were very kind at the hospital.’”

“I know what I said.”

“For eleven days. To everybody. Like a man reading out a notice.”

“Elodie, I know what I said.”

Then she sat down on the window seat, which she does when she has decided something, and said, “I am going to tell you a thing now, and you are going to want to be generous about it, and I am asking you not to be. Be exactly as angry as you are.”

· · ·Scene break

Here it is, in the order she gave it to me.

When we married, the press in Madrid put her on the file as my English reader. It was not sentimental: they were paying for somebody who could check an English source against my Spanish, and they had one in the house. Amalia Sanchis has run that list for twenty years and does not revise it unless somebody dies or complains.

Nobody told her anything. I moved out in the September, the decree came six months after that, and the working files went on arriving at the address they had always arrived at, three or four a year, with my queries and my discards and my margin notes in them, because a working file is not a manuscript, it is a man thinking with the door open.

She never wrote the email. One line, ten seconds: I am no longer the reader on this file. She did not write it for two years.

She printed them. She read them at her own table with a pencil. She corrected them — not for anyone, not to be sent, not to be shown; she tightened what wanted tightening, the way you straighten a picture in a house you have left — and she put them in a folder in the one drawer in her flat that locks, and she never told the press, and she never told me.

“Eleven files,” she said. “Four books. It stopped two years later, when Sanchis retired the old address, and I did not write to her then either, and I want you to notice that I had a second chance and used it to do nothing.”

I did not say anything. I used all four of my seconds, and at the end of them I did not do the elegant thing, which would have been to tell her it did not matter.

“That’s mine,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Those are my working files. That is me at two in the morning being no good yet. You read two years of it.”

“Yes.”

“And you never once —“

“No.”

“You could have asked me,” I said. “I would have given you anything in that folder. I would have given you the notebooks, if I had known where they were. You did not have to steal it.”

“I know.” She had her hands flat on her knees. “I wanted it to be stealing. If I had asked, you would have given it to me the way you give people things — completely, at once, with the difficulty already taken out — and then I would have had to be grateful, and I would have had to have a conversation with you about why I wanted it.”

“Which was.”

“Because it was the only part of you still arriving,” she said.

I went and stood at the window.

“There is one more piece,” she said, behind me. “It is the piece I have been unable to say since the tenth of October, and it is why I am saying any of this tonight. One of those files was not a translation.”

I knew before she finished, in the way you know a sentence is going to break badly two words before it does.

“The Belda, the one with the reservoir,” she said. “You had written yourself a specimen paragraph to test the register. Three hundred words, in Spanish, about a man packing a kitchen into boxes in one day with a marker pen, and not asking his wife which things were hers. It is in the file, between a list of queries and a paragraph about a dam. I tightened three sentences of it. I could not improve the fourth.”

“The fourth is —“

“I know what the fourth is. I have known what the fourth is for three years.”

“Say the date,” I said.

“The tenth of October,” she said. “You read page seventy-nine out loud in Italian and stood up in the middle of a clause and went down the stairs, and I sat at that desk knowing exactly whose sentence it was and knowing that I could not say one word about how I knew, and I did the only thing that was left. I translated it straight.”

I had to sit down for that, and I sat down on the arm of Giulia’s reading chair, which nobody sits on.

Since the twenty-fifth of January I have been carrying about, as a private consolation, the sentence she could not possibly have known. It let me keep a letter in a coat pocket eleven feet from her chair and call it discretion.

“You knew whose it was,” I said, “and you left it straight.”

“There was nothing else to do with it.”

“Elodie, there were nine things to do with it. I would have done six of them in the first minute.”

“Yes,” she said. “That is the difference between us and it has never been in my favour.”

· · ·Scene break

At twenty to two in the morning I put the pages back in the box.

I was not going to get through the rest of it in that room, with a dead woman’s cardigan folded on the arm of the chair and three hundred pages of somebody else’s marriage on the desk between us.

“There is something I have to read to you,” I said. “It is four sides and it is two years old.”

“All right.”

“Not here. Not in her room.” I put my coat on, because if I had not put my coat on I would have kept talking, and the next part of it was going to be a management proposal with dates in it. “Can I come to your flat tomorrow? Whatever time suits you. If you would rather I posted it I will post it, but I would rather read it to you, and I would rather you said no to my face than in an email.”

She stood in the light of the desk lamp with her coat over her arm and thought about it, which is the thing about her.

“Eight o’clock,” she said. “Don’t bring anything.”

I walked home along the water at two in the morning with four sides of hotel paper in my inside pocket, where they had been for eleven days. They had been a thing I was carrying; that night they were a thing I had promised, and the difference kept me awake until five, and I would take it again.