The Translator

There was in Véspera a language that only two people in the world spoke, and one of them was Eulália, and the other was her son, and it was that language, spoken between two, that made Eulália's life and very nearly unmade it.

It was a Tuesday, market day, and the two of them were in the square, at Aurora's stall, the vegetable stall. Tomé took up a bunch of coriander, raised it to his nose, and made a sound, a short sound, with his head to one side, and Eulália, without looking, knew. Not those, she said to Aurora. The others, the ones at the end, these are past their best. Aurora looked at Tomé, looked at the coriander, and did not see how Eulália knew, about the ones at the end, if the man had said nothing, if the man had only made that sound she, Aurora, had been hearing for thirty years without ever realising it was speech. You two understand each other, Dona Eulália, said Aurora, wrapping up the good coriander. It is a gift. And Eulália smiled the smile of always, the smile of one who has heard that a thousand times, and did not say what she knew, which was that it was no gift at all, it was work, it was thirty years of attention, it was having learned, sound by sound, that a coriander past its best had for Tomé a smell that made him turn his head that way and not another.

Because Tomé had come into the world saying things in another way. He was not deaf, he heard everything; he was not simple, he understood everything, and faster than many people who spoke at their ease; but what he had inside him did not come out of his mouth in the language of others, it came out in something else, in sounds that were not words, in movements of the hands, in ways of looking, in silences that said more than other people's silences. And the village, which knew only how to hear its own language, looked at Tomé and did not understand him, and because it did not understand him it thought he had nothing to say, which was the most wrong thing in the world, because Tomé had as much to say as anyone, only in a language no one had taken the trouble to learn.

No one, save the mother. Eulália had learned her son's language the way one learns to breathe, without knowing she was learning, and she had learned it in pieces, across years of kitchen and of sleepless nights. She still remembered the afternoon she had discovered the difference between the two sounds. Tomé would have been three or so, and he would make a high sound, and she would come running with the pap, and he would refuse the pap and make the same sound, and she despaired, because she did not understand, because the sound was the same, and she gave him the pap and he screamed and she wept at not knowing, until once, just once, she noticed that when it was hunger he closed his hand and when it was something else he opened it, and the something else, she discovered that afternoon, was fear, fear of the neighbour's dog barking in the street, and from that afternoon on there were in the world two sounds where before there had been one, and Eulália knew, for the first time, that this was a language, and that she would have to learn it whole, word by word, with no dictionary, with no one to teach it to her, only she and her son and the years.

It must be said too, if Tomé is to be understood, that he was not a sad boy nor a bitter man. On the contrary. He had a clean joy, and his laughter, when it came, was one of the most beautiful things in Véspera, a laughter that came from the depths, that filled the house. He liked the sun on his face, he liked music, he liked the feel of certain things, he liked to laugh. Of an evening the mother would put on for him an old record, an old fado that had been her father's, and Tomé would close his eyes and sway his body, and sometimes, at the end, he would strike his hand on his knee, out of contentment, and Eulália knew, by his striking it so, that it was to put it on again. Tomé's tragedy was never having nothing within; it was having no way of showing the world the great deal he had within. He was a man full within and mute without, and the mother was the only chink through which that within came out to the world, and that was why the mother was so important, because without her all that inner world stayed shut in there, invisible, and the world outside saw only a man who made sounds and gestures and never imagined the universe there was behind them.

And so she became the translator. Wherever they went, it was Eulália who told the world what Tomé meant to say. There was a time, at the health post, when she saw plainly what it was to be that chink. Doctor Vilar, the one before the one there is now, asked Tomé where it hurt, and Tomé made the sound of pain and put his hand to his belly, at the side, and Vilar, who did not know the difference, was about to write a thing down, and Eulália said, on the right side, doctor, it is not the whole belly, it is here, and these two days, that he slept ill the night before last and last night and today has not even eaten. And Vilar set down his pen and looked at her as one looks at a strange thing, and said, you heard him say that? And Eulália said yes, and it was true, she had heard, in the sound and the hand and the way Tomé bent his body, a whole sentence the doctor had not heard because he did not know the language. She was the bridge. She was the only road by which what Tomé had inside reached the world outside.

And there was in this a greatness, it must be said. Eulália saved her son a thousand times, in a thousand consultations, in a thousand meetings in which, without her, Tomé would have been treated as a case and not as a person. She was, for decades, the difference between Tomé being a person in the eyes of the village and Tomé being a problem, and that is no small thing, it is a whole lifetime of love translated into vigilance, into never being able to be absent, because if she were absent her son was left without a voice.

The people, in the village, thought they knew what Eulália's life was. They would say, in passing, oh the devotion of that woman, oh how well she cares for her son, and Eulália heard it and bowed her head. But no one knew what it was to be always on duty, with no holidays, no days off, not a minute in which one could switch off. A mother who is her son's only bridge to the world never has a moment of rest: even asleep, she sleeps with one ear open; even ill, she has to get up; even at the end of her strength, she has to be there, because a language that only one person speaks has no understudies. There was one Christmas, one, when Eulália had a fever of forty and got up all the same, because Tomé had woken distressed from a dream and was making his sound in the dark and there was no one else in the house who understood him, and she went, trembling with fever, and sat on his bed making him the sound of comfort until he fell asleep, and only then did she let herself drop, in the corridor, against the wall, and stayed there until she had strength to go to bed. No one saw. No one knew. In the morning she was on her feet, with the broth on the fire, and the neighbour who came to bring the king's cake said to her, oh Eulália, you are a saint, and Eulália thanked her, and said nothing of the corridor.

But every bridge has a weight, and the weight of this one fell entirely on Eulália, and it fell in a way she did not see because she was too busy being the bridge to notice what the bridge was costing her. What it cost her was herself. Because a person who spends their life saying what another wants to say slowly stops saying what they themselves want; and Eulália, after so many years of being Tomé's mouth, had almost no mouth left for herself, no longer knew, if she were asked, what she wanted, what she thought, because for decades everything that came out of Eulália's mouth began with "he," and nothing, or almost nothing, began with "I."

There was an afternoon, at someone's house, when this appeared to her whole, though she only understood it much later. Eulália and Tomé had gone to see Lurdes, an acquaintance of years, and Lurdes, who had known Tomé since he was a boy, spoke to him looking at the mother. She asked him, well then, Tomé, how have you been keeping, and did not even wait for him to make the sound, turned at once to Eulália, well then, Dona Eulália, how is he keeping. As though Tomé were an eternal child or a piece of the furniture, and not a man who was there, sitting, listening, understanding everything. And Tomé lowered his eyes, and Eulália saw him lower his eyes, and felt the dull anger of always, the anger of seeing her son treated as though he were not present. But she answered. He has been well, Lurdes, thank you, he was poorly but it has passed. She answered, as she always answered, because it was quicker for her to answer than to wait for the world to take the trouble to speak to Tomé and to wait for his answer. And so, without noticing, Eulália went on becoming complicit in the effacing of her son in the eyes of the world, at the same time as she was the only one who saw him whole: she, who knew him best, was also the one who most helped the world not to have to know him.

They walked home, from Lurdes's, and halfway there Tomé stopped, and made a sound, and looked at the mother, and Eulália, who knew the whole language, understood what he said, and it was she spoke to you, not to me. And Eulália, who had an answer for everything in her son's world, had no answer for that. She put her hand on his shoulder, and said, I know, son, I know, and they went on. And that night, after putting him to bed, Eulália sat at the kitchen table, alone, and tried to know what she herself thought, not about a thing of Tomé's, about any thing at all, about the weather, the village, herself, and came upon an emptiness, a silence, as though the part of her that had opinions and wishes had withered from so much not being used, the way an arm withers that is carried against the chest for years on end. She spoke all day, more than anyone in the village, and at the same time she was, without anyone knowing, the most silent woman in Véspera, because nothing of what she said was her own.

She was known, in the village, as Tomé's mother. Not by her name. Few people, perhaps, remembered her name, Eulália, the beautiful name her mother had given her dreaming of a daughter of easy word. She was Tomé's mother, and she was the translator, and those two things had eaten her name. And she had accepted that it be so, had even thought it was how it ought to be, that a good mother is exactly that, someone who disappears behind her child, who makes herself wholly his. Eulália thought she was being a good mother. And she was. But she was also, without knowing it, disappearing, and no one disappears for free, and the account of that disappearance would come to her one day, as all accounts come, when least expected and there is no longer any way to put it off.

There was a night, around that time, that showed well what that life of two was, how much it had of good and how much it exacted. A storm came, one of the great ones, of those that made the windowpanes tremble, and Tomé, who had always been afraid of thunder since he was a boy, woke, and made his sound, and Eulália heard him from the other room, with one ear open as she always slept, and got up. She went to him, in the dark, and sat on his bed, and made him the sound of comfort, and Tomé clung to her arm, and at each thunderclap Eulália said, in the language of the two of them, with her hand pressing his hand in a certain rhythm, which was the way he understood, it has passed, it is passing, I am here. And they stayed like that, mother and son, by the light of the lightning, she translating the storm to him, telling him the noise did no harm, that it was far off, that the house was strong, and Tomé went on calming, and fell asleep holding her hand, and Eulália stayed there, on the edge of the bed, with her hand caught in her son's, watching the lightning through the chink of the window, and there was in it a sweetness she would not have traded for anything, that of being, in the whole world, the only person who could tell that man that the storm was passing in a way that he understood. And there was also, beneath the sweetness, a thing she did not see: that it was three in the morning, that she had worked since six, that she would work until night, and that there was not, neither that night nor any, anyone who could get up in her place, because the language of comfort only she spoke, and a comfort that only one person knows how to give has no one to relieve it at three in the morning. She went back to her own bed when the storm passed, and slept two hours, and at six she was on her feet, and no one knew of the night, and in the morning, over her coffee, she felt herself the richest woman in the world and the most tired, the two things at the same time, and did not understand, yet, that they were the same thing.

And yet the reverse of this must also be said, so that the story be just. That language of two, which would come to prove a prison, was for many years the most beautiful thing in Eulália's life. There was between her and Tomé an intimacy that few mothers and few sons ever come to know, of those who share a secret language, who understand each other without words. Of an evening, with the fado playing, the two of them communicated without anyone understanding them, and there was a world there that was theirs alone, warm, closed, safe, and Eulália would not have traded it for anything. The problem, she would understand much later, was never the love; the love was good. The problem was that the language of two had become the only language Eulália spoke, to the point that she forgot she had, somewhere, a language all her own, never yet used.

She was fifty-and-some when this story begins, and Tomé was a grown man now, with his beard, with his adult body, but who still needed his mother to reach the world, because the world had never learned his language, had never had to learn it, because there was always Eulália to translate, and no one learns a language they have no need to know. And it was this, this arrangement of a life, this bridge of two people, that seemed so solid, so eternal, that one fright, a single fright, would set trembling, showing Eulália, all at once, what she had built: a road by which her son went out to the world and by which she herself had never again come home to herself.