Same Page

We finished on the twentieth of March, which was a Thursday, and the deadline was the Monday, so we had four days in hand.

The five weeks before it went like this. We came back from Turin by way of a lunch in her mother’s kitchen involving peppers, at which I was asked twice whether I was eating and not once where I had been for three years. Chapter fourteen took eleven days, the slowest work either of us has done in twenty years. The second pass took the rest. Renzo sent eighty-one queries and was right about twenty-nine of them, his best rate of the project, and in the first week of March he commissioned Noor for the German, by email, with no preamble.

And in five weeks neither of us raised March. We agreed on the Sunday, on a train, that we would not decide anything until the book was in, and we both kept to it, which is the first agreement the two of us have ever kept that was not lodged with a solicitor.

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Chapter fourteen is the eight months. It begins on the Wednesday after the neighbour’s funeral — the Wednesday the demonstrative on page one hundred and eighty-seven has been pointing at since 2021 — and ends the following spring, and it is nineteen pages in the first person plural. Noi. She does not use it anywhere else in the book.

It is about two people being extremely good at things. There is a scene in a hospital corridor, three-quarters of a page, in which the wife asks the husband something and the husband says no and then asks whether there is a form, and the chapter does not say what she asked, and goes on to a funeral.

She never names the thing that has happened. It is done entirely in logistics: what was rung, what was moved, who was told in which order, which of them slept.

Elodie read the corridor page out loud on the first morning, in Italian, and got to the end of it and put the sheet down and said, “She isn’t writing us. She’s writing what she could see from the other side of the room, which is all anybody ever gets, and it is the part we would both have called nothing.”

The last paragraph we did by a method neither of us has used before with another person: each of us wrote it alone, at our own end of the desk, and then we turned them round at the same time.

Quell’anno facemmo tutto bene.

That year we did everything well.

Ese año lo hicimos todo bien.

Same length, same flatness, the weight in the same place, nothing explained. Noor found nineteen of those in the first hundred and twenty pages. That one we did on purpose, side by side, having said out loud beforehand what each of us was going to try to do, and it is the first one we arrived at with the machinery showing.

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Renzo came at noon on the Thursday to take the estate’s copy and sign what Morag needed signing.

While Elodie was on the telephone to London about the proof schedule, I took him into Giulia’s kitchen and told him about the letter.

Nobody had asked, and there was no reason for a translator to tell the author’s son that his mother had read four sides of his private correspondence in a spare room in Madrid.

I told him she took three notebooks of mine while she was staying with me, read all three, wrote in the margins of every one, and that in the back of the third there was an unfinished letter to Elodie about our daughter, who was born dead five years ago in February at twenty-two weeks, and that his mother read it and wrote at the bottom of it, in pencil, in English, She would have wanted this one sent, and then posted the notebooks back to me eighteen days before she died and never said one word about any of it, at her own table, in June, when I told her I was well.

Renzo stood with his back against his mother’s counter and said nothing for a while.

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because in January you said you wanted one page where she was angry, so that you could have it. That is the nearest thing I have to give you, and it is not anger.”

“No.”

“She had it in her hands for two years and did not send it and did not tell either of us she had read it. I think she was refusing to do it for us.” I put the cups in the sink, because it was that or a list. “So she left us a room instead and made us sit in it until we could do it ourselves, and she did not live to see the end of it.”

“She was a menace,” he said, in Italian, to the window, and his voice went somewhere on the second word and came back. Then: “Thank you for telling me a thing I did not ask for. Nobody has done that since September. Everybody here is extremely careful with me.”

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We did the dedication with him in the room, which was Elodie’s decision. She put the sheet on the kitchen table — four months of a handbag in it — and read him the eleven characters, and told him what they said.

A E. & M. — ditevelo.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he laughed, once, the way people do at a funeral when somebody gets the dead person exactly right. “That is my mother’s handwriting doing my mother’s voice,” he said. “It goes in as written. Both editions. Her hand, photographed, at the size she wrote it. Not typeset, not translated, no note.”

“It will be read as coyness,” Elodie said.

“Let them. She wrote it in a code with one reader and left it where the printer would find it, which means she wanted it printed and she wanted it unreadable, and I am not going to be the man who explains my mother.”

So that is what stands at the front: eleven characters in soft pencil, and under them, in eight-point type, in both of ours, the only line the two of us have ever signed together.

Per Giulia Ferro, che ci ha messo in una stanza.

For Giulia Ferro, who put us in a room.

We argued about it for forty minutes. I wanted “who shut us in a room”; Elodie said that “shut” gives Giulia a motive and the line is better without one; and I came round to it out loud, at the time, in the room.

The title took nine minutes, having sat at the top of the PENDING page since the second of October. The Spanish cannot be Casa con dos puertas and never could; it will be La casa que no se cierra. The English is the phrase I offered in October and she turned down: A House That Cannot Be Shut. “It is a title now,” she said. “It was not one in October, because neither of us had read page three hundred and eleven.”

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Nella props both doors of the flat open to get the air through, the only time in the novel that both are open at once. Then the last sentence.

Lasciò aperte tutte e due le porte, perché passasse l’aria[·] in quella casa non era mai stato lui, a mancarle.

In the typescript there is a mark between those two clauses, and the mark is not a mark. It is the joined stroke and comma that anybody who has typed her drafts knows means change this — the same one she put against the espresso machine in 2021 and followed with no and una cosa sola.

This time there is no instruction after it. She marked her own last sentence for a decision, and then she was ill from March and dead in September, and the last punctuation in her last book was left open.

The alternating final cut gives that chapter to Elodie. Neither of us mentioned it and neither of us looked it up.

We put a semicolon in it.

Not a full stop, which turns the second clause into an announcement, a woman in a doorway summing herself up; not a comma, which makes the doors and the missing into a list of two household facts. A semicolon holds the halves apart and joined at once, which is what it did on page seventy-nine in October and on page two hundred and seventy-one, with her son on the other side of this desk telling us we had made it soft.

She had her pencil on her sheet and I had mine on mine, and we put it in at the same time, and neither of us said anything clever, and hers went in the groove and mine went next to it.

Mancarle. He had never been the one who was missing — to her. Italian will not let the woman be the subject of that verb. The absence does the acting; she is the one it is done to, and the clitic on the end holds her there, in the case the language keeps for people that things happen to. Spanish does the same, el que le faltaba, and I had it in four seconds, and it cost me something to say so out loud with her sitting there.

English cannot. English makes her do it: the one she had been missing puts her at the front of her own sentence, in charge, missing him as an activity, which is not what the book has spent three hundred pages being about.

Elodie’s answer, after four days, is six words: it had never been him that was missing. The dative is gone and nothing is put in its place — no gloss, none of the small compensations a good translator can always find and that are always, at bottom, a footnote in the wrong font.

So we wrote the note that says so. A translator’s note stands at the foot of a page with one name under it; this one is in two hands, hers in the margin in the grey pencils she cannot buy here and mine underneath, and it says that the Italian holds the woman in a case English does not have, that we have not compensated, and that the reader is asked to hear it missing.

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At six o’clock we had two coffees on the desk and nothing left to do.

She had brought the folder that morning. I knew, because the bag had been on the back of her chair since nine, and I had watched myself not mention it for nine hours.

“Can I read it?”

“Yes.”

She took it out and put it on the desk and did not hand it to me, which I understood and was grateful for.

It is two years of my working files with a woman’s pencil in them. About a third of the marks are things I would fight her on, and I said so, twice, and she said “you always did”.

The kitchen page is near the bottom of it. Three hundred words about a man packing a kitchen with a marker pen, in the middle of a file about a reservoir; three sentences tightened in a hand I have known for fourteen years; and the fourth untouched, with nothing beside it at all.

“You didn’t mark it.”

“I couldn’t improve it,” she said. “It is the only sentence of anybody’s in twenty years I have not been able to improve, and I have been carrying that about as a private humiliation since I was thirty-five.”

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Then we said it, at a desk, with the lamps on, and it took about twenty minutes and had no ceremony in it whatsoever.

“A bookseller asked me in January what happens in March,” she said. “I stood in his shop and had nothing, and then I bought a dictionary I did not need.”

“I want to be married to you again,” I said. “Not a new one, and not a better one with a different woman’s name on it. That one. The same marriage, slowly, with the parts that were good, which were most of them, and with the thing we did to it out where we can both see it.”

She did not say anything for a moment. Then: “Say what you are agreeing to. Itemise it.”

“We are going to make a list, aren’t we.”

“We are two translators in a dead woman’s study. Of course we are going to make a list.”

So we did it properly, out loud, one at a time.

I said: when I know a thing she would want to know, I say it the same day, in whatever words I have, and if the words are bad I say it in bad words. I said: I ask instead of arranging. I said: I do not decide on my own, standing up in a corridor, in four seconds, what another person can stand. I said: I am not going back to Madrid in April; I keep the flat until the summer, because a man ought to be able to pack his own kitchen, and I take a let in this city in my own name, because I am not moving into anything yet.

She said: she does not keep a locked drawer. She said: when she is translating a thing instead of feeling it, she says so at the time — “and I will not always catch it, so you are allowed to say you’re annotating, and I am allowed to be extremely unpleasant to you for about a minute afterwards.” She said: she goes to Turin on the fourteenth of February every year and will go on going, and if she wants me there she will say so out loud, and if she does not she will say that out loud too, and I do not get to read it off a diary a second time.

And she said: “We keep the rule.”

“We have just said everything.”

“We keep the rule, because in August, or in the first October when something goes wrong, I will want it, and I would rather it existed already than have to ask you to invent one for me. One true sentence a day, in whichever language it arrives in, and the other does not translate it.”

“Agreed.”

“Say it back so I know you have heard the whole thing.”

I said it back.

Nobody knelt. Nobody rang anybody. The coffee was cold by then and neither of us got up to make more.

She put her pencil in the groove. I put mine next to it.

On the desk between us were two cups, and three hundred and eleven pages in a language their author is not here to be asked about, and the last sheet of all with a semicolon in it that we had put there together, and in the margin of that sheet two sets of handwriting where a translator’s note has one.

At the bottom of the note, under her initial and mine with the mark she used for and between them, Elodie wrote the Italian word on its own, because it is the only one of the three that does the whole job, and neither of us translated it.

Mancare.