Ghost Handwriting

We left the box shut overnight, which I am aware was superstition dressed up as procedure, and opened it at nine the next morning with the lamps on, because October had arrived in Edinburgh the way it always does, overnight and without discussion.

Inside was Giulia’s own copy of the typescript, three hundred and eleven pages, held together with two bulldog clips and a rubber band that had perished into a sticky thread. The top sheet was blank apart from the rubber band’s ghost. Under it, the pages began, and in the margins of forty of them, in pencil and in two colours of ink, was her handwriting.

Her hand was appalling. It had been appalling for the whole fourteen years I had known it, and by her own account for thirty before that: an upright scrawl that ran uphill and abbreviated anything it found boring, and I had learned to read it at twenty-four in a flat in Turin with a typewriter and a dictionary and a woman standing behind my chair saying no, no, that word is for weather, you can’t use it for a man.

Mateo turned the first annotated page towards the light and I watched him get about four words in before he handed it across the desk to me without a word. He can read her print. Nobody could read her handwriting except me and, on a good day, her son.

“Page fourteen,” I said. “Top margin. It’s in English.”

“She wrote her notes in English?”

“She wrote them in Italian unless she wanted to be unanswerable.” I turned the page flat between us in the groove of the desk so we could both see it, which put our hands nine inches apart, and I noted that fact the way you note a draught from a window. “When she wanted to be unanswerable she wrote in English, which she spoke like a woman throwing plates.”

I read it out.

To E. and M. — the first of you to reach for a dictionary loses. I have watched you both do this to win an argument about a word you already knew perfectly well.

There was a silence of about four seconds.

“That’s not fair,” Mateo said.

“It’s completely fair.”

“It is not fair, because she has now made it impossible to use a dictionary in this room for six months without one of us saying something.”

“You could simply know the words.”

“Elodie.”

“I’m agreeing with you,” I said. “I’m agreeing with you in a tone. It’s a different service.”

He put his head in his hands, briefly, and when he lifted it he was doing the thing with his mouth. Menace, he said, in Spanish, to the ceiling, and it came out fond, the way you say it about someone who is not going to walk through the door again and make it worse.

Here is what forty pages of margin notes actually are, when you take away the fact that they were written by a woman who is dead.

They are the best working notes I have ever been given by an author, and I have worked with living ones who would not tell me what a pronoun referred to if I sent three emails.

p. 22. The repetition is deliberate. She says “it’s fine” four times and means a different thing each time. If either of you varies it for elegance I will know.

p. 31. This is the only joke in the chapter. Protect it. E., you will want to explain it. Don’t explain it.

p. 40. I don’t know what this paragraph is for either. If it still doesn’t work in your language, it doesn’t work in mine. Cut it and tell Renzo I said so.

That last one Mateo read three times, holding the page at arm’s length. “She’s giving us permission to cut.”

“She’s giving us permission to cut one paragraph, having identified which one, and she’s told us to blame her to her son. That’s not permission, that’s a trap with a handle on it.”

“It’s an instruction from the author.”

“It’s an instruction from Giulia.” I took the page off him. “Which means it’s a test of whether we’ll do it lazily. Read the paragraph.”

We read the paragraph. It was a description of a stairwell, forty words, and it was doing nothing except delaying the wife’s entrance by four seconds.

“It’s a rest,” Mateo said slowly.

“It’s a rest.”

“It’s not a paragraph, it’s a bar of silence before she comes in the door.”

“So it works,” I said, “and she knew it worked, and she wanted to find out whether we could say why.”

He wrote keep in the margin in his own pencil, very small, next to her note, and then sat looking at the two hands on the same page for a moment longer than the act required.

· · ·Scene break

We did five pages that day, which is either very slow or very fast depending on whether you have ever done this.

The thing nobody tells you about translation is that it is almost entirely two people arguing about a third person’s intentions, except that usually the two people are you and yourself. Doing it out loud, with someone who hears the sentence the way you hear it, is not twice the speed. It is a different activity altogether. It is the difference between humming and singing with another person in a stairwell and finding out the building was built for it.

On page twenty-six the wife says magari to her husband, and my whole morning stopped.

There is no English for magari. It is the word Italians use for if only and for maybe and for I wish, and for yes, obviously, and it will never happen, all four at once, and the meaning lands wherever the speaker’s face is. Nella says it to Corrado when he suggests they go to the sea in September. It is one word and it carries the entire marriage in it: she would love to, she does not believe him, she has stopped believing him at some point that neither of them noticed, and she is not going to say any of that before lunch.

“Ojalá,” Mateo said, and wrote it down, and I could have thrown the lamp at him.

Because Spanish has it. Spanish has it exactly, that word from the Arabic, if God wills it, the hope with the doubt built into the grammar, and he had it in four seconds and I had a language with four hundred thousand words and not one of them was the right one.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You wrote it down like a man buying something.”

“I wrote it down because it’s the word.” He put the pencil in the groove. “What have you got?”

“‘If only.’ Which is pure longing and no irony. ‘Maybe.’ Which is pure irony and no longing. ‘That would be nice.’ Which is what a woman says to a man she has stopped listening to, and it’s close, but it’s forty per cent too English — it puts her in a cardigan in Surrey.”

“What’s the shape of it?”

“The shape?”

“You always ask me for the shape when I’m stuck. You’ve never once let me hand you a word, you make me draw it.” He turned his chair slightly. “So. Not the meaning. The shape. How long is it, what’s it made of, where does the weight sit?”

I looked at the page.

“Short,” I said. “One breath. The weight’s at the front. It starts warm and cools while it’s in the air. And she doesn’t finish the thought afterwards — the sentence ends, and the silence does the second half.”

“Then it can’t be three words.”

“It can’t be three words,” I agreed, and then, because he had built me the box and stood back from it, I found it. “Lovely. On its own. ‘Lovely,’ she said, and went back to the sink.”

He did not say anything for a second. Then he wrote it down on his own page, in the margin, which he had no professional reason to do, since he was not translating into English.

“That’s it,” he said.

“It’s a bit thin.”

“Elodie. That’s it.”

“It’s thin, but it’s the right thinness,” I said, and had to get up and go and look at the bookshelf for a moment, because I was thirty-eight years old and had not been that pleased with a single word in about three years, and there is no dignified way to stand in a room with your ex-husband when he has just made you good at your job again.

The bookshelf did not help, incidentally. The bookshelf was all Giulia’s, which meant it was half our translations, hers and mine and his, stacked flat because she never learned to shelve anything properly, and about nine inches of it was a run of books with my name in the front and his name in the front and, on four of them, both.

· · ·Scene break

Renzo’s first email arrived at ten past six that evening, while we were putting the pages back in the box. Subject line: Queries, 1 October, pp. 1–5.

There were eleven of them. They were numbered. Query four was p. 3: “wept.” My mother did not write “wept.” Nobody in my mother’s life has ever wept. Query nine was about a word in the Spanish that his colleague in Valencia had flagged and that Mateo, to his credit, had been unhappy with himself.

“He’s going to do this every week,” Mateo said, reading over my shoulder, which he had not asked to do and which I had not objected to.

“He’s going to do this every page. He said so.” I scrolled. “Good.”

“Good?”

“He’s the only person left who can hear her voice without the professional filter on. We should be frightened of him. Query four is right, by the way, ‘wept’ is disgusting, I’ll change it tonight.”

“You wrote ‘wept’?”

“I wrote ‘wept’ at four in the afternoon on my first day back at the same table as you,” I said, “and if you say one word about it I’ll tell Renzo you wanted to cut the stairwell.”

· · ·Scene break

The notes were the last thing I read before we shut the box.

There were two more that day that I have not been able to put down since, and I am going to set them here as they were written, because I have discovered that I cannot paraphrase them without softening them, and softening them would be exactly the thing she spent forty pages telling us not to do.

On page thirty-three, beside a passage where the husband organises a difficult evening so well that nobody has to feel anything:

M. — you will want to be elegant here. Don’t be elegant here. Be exact, and let it be ugly. Elegance is the thing you do instead of saying it, caro, and I have watched you do it at my own table.

I read that one out before I had read it to myself, which is a beginner’s mistake and I have been doing this for sixteen years. There was nothing to do afterwards but let it sit there in the lamplight between us with her handwriting going uphill.

He said, eventually, “She’s not wrong.”

“No.”

“Read the next one.”

The next one was on page thirty-four, and it was mine.

E. — you will footnote this. You will write a beautiful note explaining what the Italian is doing, and it will be correct, and it will be a place to stand so you don’t have to be in the sentence. Be in the sentence. I have been waiting eleven years to say that to you and now you can’t argue with me, which is, I admit, the entire reason I am dead.

Mateo laughed. It came out of him before he could stop it, one shocked half-second of a laugh, and then he looked at my face and stopped.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s—“ I put the page down. “It’s funny.”

“It’s not.”

“It’s extremely funny. She spent thirty years telling me that. She just never had the nerve to put it in writing while I could reply.” My voice did something on the last word and I took it back under control the way you take a car back on ice, gently, without braking. “There are thirty-two more pages of these.”

“Thirty-three,” he said. “You’ve been at forty-eight per cent of the box all day.”

“And we’ve done five pages of three hundred and eleven.”

“Yes.”

“And she’s in the room,” I said.

He looked at the cardigan on the reading chair and then at the desk she had built for two people who argued about elbow room, and he did not pretend to misunderstand me, which I had half expected and would have deserved.

“She’s in the room,” he agreed.

We put the lid on the box. We did not put it away, because there is nowhere in that study to put anything away; it is a room with no surfaces left, by instruction.

And at the door, with my coat on, I said the thing I had been not saying since eleven o’clock that morning.

“We haven’t done the front matter.”

“The front matter isn’t the book.”

“The front matter is the first thing anyone reads and she will have known exactly what was on it.” I put the key in my pocket. “Title page, epigraph, dedication. Tomorrow. Properly, before we go any further in, because if there’s an epigraph in Greek I want to be in a bad mood about it early.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, and held the door, out of reflex, the way he always has.