At my father’s funeral, Emma, newly Orthodox, wearing stockings with visible seams, a wig too dark for her pale face, said, Never question your father, he always did right by you.
I wasn’t aware he’d done anything for me, I said.
She slapped me.
Your mother wouldn’t care for you! she said. She wouldn’t nurse you, she wouldn’t touch you! I had to fly in from California, you and your colic. Your father put up with a lot!
After the funeral, I found letters my mother had written him before I was born. They smelled like her! I burned them unread. And threw my father’s decanters, his ashtrays still filmed with ash against the wall, threw his papers, the minutes from his precious Archaic Greek Research Organization meetings, his statuary photos into the flames, his books, in Latin and other ancient scripts into overflowing boxes, dragged them onto the street. His wedding ring — he’d saved his wedding ring! — with its improbable inscription, I sent to Emma. Then I screamed for him, I screamed at him, at both of them, for always leaving me so alone. Then swept up the shards, mopped the grappa from the floor.
She did this to us, she abandoned us, she turned my father into a drunk. Ahmad knew something about bad mothers? He knew nothing about bad mothers!
A Directory Assistance robot connected me to Angeline Chao. I was sorry to bother her, but Ahmad-this, and missed-messages-that, and what had her note been about?
She’d been concerned about Andi’s story, she said. She’d wanted to make sure everything was okay in our happy home. Ahmad had charmed her. It was no big deal.
You’re wrong, I thought. It’s a big deal, a very big deal.
41. THE HERO’S DESCENT
I slept little that night, imagining the worst: Ahmad and I no longer speaking, the metamorphosis mural on Andrea’s wall whitewashed, replaced by lifelike portraits of Ahmad’s four sons, pensive, their chins jutting out in the noble Pakistani style. Ahmad ensconced in his Connecticut mansion, Andi and I at the Y, Andi noting my shortcomings in her Observations Notebook, crying for Ahmad as once I’d cried for my mother: only Ahmad can draw her bath, only Ahmad can tell her what to wear. I am helpless to comfort her: I don’t want you, she says, I want him. Blaming me, leaving me, walking to Connecticut, a store of apples in her knapsack.
I’d made a wrong turn, somehow; the connective tissue that bound my life had become fragile: under pressure, it threatened to tear apart. The lives of others were held together by a mightier gravity, I thought: they orbited their suns happily, their moons securely in place, tugging at their tides in love and gratitude.
Too many metaphors for such a late hour, but I was at a loss. How could I have thought Ahmad and I strong enough to be loco parenti? Friends for six months at fifteen, reacquainted for a few hours at thirty-five; both times he’d turned on me. This was Ahmad, this was who he was — did I think he’d changed? People don’t change!
Dreams flickered like clouds: temp jobs I’d had, the flash of T.’s ring, which was my father’s ring. Buttoning my blouse on Fourteenth Street while Gal Monday through Friday filled my former desk with soybeans and food-grade plastic containers. I was climbing a mountain, Andi behind me. On top were incredible wonders, but Andi was falling behind, I could feel the pull of her suffering: Sweetheart, come on, the top is just there! Wait! she cried. Wait for me! Come along! I called. But she was falling! Hurtling toward earth, my baby, my little child! Like Icarus dropped from the sky, my flying, my falling girl! I reached for her, but my arms weren’t long enough. I screamed for her, but my scream wasn’t strong enough. I called for Ahmad, for anyone, I flailed my arms, hoping to grab onto something. But Ahmad wasn’t there, he’d never been there, not for any of it — I was as alone as I ever was, as alone as I’d ever be, floating on that ice floe alone. I threw myself off the mountain after her, but Andi was gone. I awoke to find that I was crying.
42. HEAD OF THE CANONICAL CLASS
I didn’t get up till Andi and Ahmad were gone: my body was too heavy, my eyes too raw. I heard the call of the Flying Girl, but I wasn’t in the mood. I brought “Screen” to Joe’s, and ordered a cinnamon bun, thighs be damned. I asked Joe if he’d seen Nate.
Who? he asked.
I chose a seat by the window, nodded at the black man with the deformed hand. Out the window, everything was as it always was: people mucking through sidewalk bins at the Dollar Store, ladies patting their hair in the Love Drugstore window. Bike messengers threading through traffic, buses exhaling at the light. It was as it always was, not as it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be new.
Without enthusiasm, I returned to Romei’s poem about the babbled phone calls — Romei calling Esther, her husband also on the line, their fractured voices speaking Italian, English, Romanian, language become Romei’s screen.
I made a note in my notebook: Ask Romei about the Romanian, or find someone to translate it. Then saw what should have been obvious: if I translated the Italian and Romanian into English, there’d be only one language on the page, not three. The terza rima—or Romei’s approximation thereof — would collapse, as would the meaning of the poem.
The poem was untranslatable.
Shit. I put the folder down and looked around. I must have looked like I was looking for something because Joe ambled over. His wife was leaning, unconcerned, against the counter, the twins where she could see them, pulling each others’ hair and laughing by the jukebox. Fine white flour dusted the hair that tufted from his shirt. I was glad for his company, but he didn’t stay, just suggested I try the sachertorte. This from the man who used to bring me baked goods, unconcerned about crumbs between the sheets. He’d been sweet and light, like all my affairs, like Clyde, who’d recited dirty limericks and called me his lemon drop. How I missed them — kind of. I wanted more now — maybe. But I wasn’t capable, was I? No man could inspire me to change, as Romei suggested. There would be no charming chiasmus.
I opened my Door Number Two notebook, wrote halfheartedly about terza rima, then stopped. My nerves felt brittle from too much caffeine, too little sleep. I wanted to rest my head on the table and dream — about sexy Italian conferences, poets claiming my time till 2020—but turned instead to “Screen”: Romei joining Esther and lo sposo for dinner, pretending to be an expert in the Bible.
And saw that he’d done it again. Syllepses this time. A figure of speech where a word is placed once in relation to at least two others, each instance suggesting a different meaning: He bought the sales pitch and the Brooklyn Bridge. She caught hell and a cold after staying out in the rain. All untranslatable. A figure of speech used here (I guessed) to show the divisions in Esther’s world, the different things she meant to her two very different men. I pulled Romei’s earlier books out of my bag to see if other translators had been faced with this challenge. They hadn’t. I knew they hadn’t.
My head was thudding. Everything about this work, absolutely everything, was untranslatable. Not just individual poems, not just the occasional phrase or play on words — but everything! The false friends, syllepses, paronomasia, the goddamned pantoums. An extended family of monkeys could try for all eternity and never manage to translate even one line.