A Separation(44)

Yvan did not say anything and I continued, In some ways it would be easier, if there was no known killer, if Christopher had been a victim of circumstance only. If we could say instead, it’s the fault of the situation.

I paused, but Yvan was silent.

Are you still there? I asked uneasily.

Yes, he said. I’m still here.

Okay.

Go on.

There’s nothing more to say.

What will you do?

That’s not up to me, I don’t think.

You’re his widow, Yvan said. You’re his wife.

I was silent.

You haven’t told them, have you?

How could I?

Will you? Is it even important anymore?

I don’t know.

Legally you are his wife.

Legally, according to one set of laws, but according to another—

What other?

I mean our own internal laws, we try to do what is right.

And according to those laws—

I let Isabella and Mark decide. Although I do so without letting them suspect that I am anything other than Christopher’s wife, his widow.

Because they would be hurt.

Because I—because we—can allow them that much, surely. They have certain illusions that I think they should be permitted to preserve—I used that phrase again—so many having been stripped from them, for example the illusion that as a parent, you do not have to bury your child.

Is this about Christopher?

I don’t understand.

I mean is this for Christopher’s sake, not Isabella and Mark’s, is all this for Christopher? He paused. Christopher is dead, the bonds of the promise you made to him no longer hold.

I was silent. Outside, a group of men sat in one of the tavernas, facing toward the sea. It must have been later than I thought, the sun was beginning to dip down toward the water and the men were drinking, perhaps they had been drinking for a while. They were far away, too far to make out their features—anyway it was unlikely that I would recognize them, I had seen no more than a handful of people in the village, I was still a stranger here. But I could hear the sound of the laughter, they were obviously having a good time.

Are you there?

Yes, I said.

He was right, of course. In Colonel Chabert, Balzac’s story of a husband returned from the dead—a work I had once translated, although not with particular success, I had not been able to find the correct register for capturing the peculiar density of Balzac’s prose, I generally translate contemporary fiction, which is an entirely different affair—the colonel of the title is presumed dead in the Napoleonic Wars. His wife promptly remarries, she believes legitimately, becoming the Countess Ferraud. Then the colonel returns, effectively from the dead, derailing her life completely, and that is where the narrative begins.

Although the story favors the colonel—the countess is the villain of the story, insofar as there is one, she is portrayed as callow, manipulative and superficial—as I worked on the translation, I found myself increasingly sympathetic to the countess, to the extent that I began to wonder if this feeling showed in the translation, if I had weighted the words without realizing it. Of course, this sympathy might not have been so errant, it might have been Balzac’s intention, the very effect he wished to cause in the reader: after all, what a terrible fate, to be faithless, to commit bigamy without being aware of it, it was all in the text itself.

Perhaps because of this concern—one that is in the end a question of fidelity, translators are always worried about being faithful to the original, an impossible task because there are multiple and often contradictory ways of being faithful, there is literal fidelity and there is in the spirit of, a phrase without concrete meaning—I thought about Chabert now. In this case it was not the unexpected arrival of the husband but his unexpected departure that led to a crisis of faith, death rather than life causing the return of the undesired relationship, the reopening of what was once thought closed.

Wasn’t that what Yvan feared? That we would sink beneath the weight of this rubble, the line between death and life was not impermeable, people and matters persisted. The return of Chabert is essentially the return of a ghost—it is only Chabert who does not realize that he is a ghost, that he does not belong with the living, and that is his tragedy—a ghost, or rather homo sacer: a man without standing in the eyes of the law. Chabert is legally dead; the central character in the book, after Chabert and his treacherous wife or widow, is Derville, a lawyer (the Count Ferraud—Yvan in this situation—is hardly present in the text).

But although we operate under the illusion that there was a single law that regulated human behavior—a universal ethical standard, a unified legal system—in fact there were multiple laws, this was what I had tried to say to Yvan. Wasn’t it also the case in Billy Budd? Captain Vere is caught between two laws, martial law and the law of God. There is no way of choosing correctly, he is haunted by the death of Billy Budd, Billy Budd, the last words of the dying Captain (in the novel, that is; the opera—the libretto written by E. M. Forster—grants Vere life, Forster and Britten having chosen to avoid the operatic cliché of yet another singer keeling over dead in the final act).

It is only when Chabert recognizes that his legal standing is distinct from his living reality—that he will never be anything but a ghost to the Countess, haunting the living when he should not—it is only when he recognizes the multiplicity of the laws governing our behavior that he allows himself to be relegated to a hospice or insane asylum, and finally accepts his status as homo sacer. Chabert relinquishes the very rights he has enlisted Derville to obtain, that is to say, the legal recognition of his status as colonel and husband, he slips down into the cracks, beyond both the reach and the acknowledgment of the law; he ceases to exist.