The delegates had to be taken head-on, directly; the translator inhabited another degree of consciousness. He was protected by his glass booth and his electrical equipment. Nothing was so unspeakable (the mashing of testicles, the forcing of live rats into vaginas) that the translator could not deal expertly with it, choosing always the perfect words and phrases. If he was alarmed, or disgusted, or sickened, or humanly terrified, he gave no indication; that was not his role; he simply converted cascades of words from one language into another language, like a sleight-of-hand artist. Marya imagined a waterfall of living words, incomprehensible at its source, rendered into a stream of fluent English which flowed over the American delegates, forcing them to hear, to attend. When English was spoken they could not not attend: that was the translator’s power. Yet he himself was untouched.

Or was he untouched, Marya wondered, staring into the glass booth from the far end of the table, some twenty feet away. Did he perhaps soften some of the very cruelest details, did he censor the obscenities now and then, even as his voice moved skillfully on . . . ? She would ask him. She would draw him aside, before lunch perhaps, and ask him. He was about her age though his mustache was tinged with gray, his sideburns graying, he would be flattered by her attention, he would probably have heard of her and be flattered, that was a card Marya could always deal if she chose.

(Marya Knauer, the author of . . . Marya Knauer the “controversial” cultural critic . . . and wasn’t she also the lover of, who was it, Eric Nichols? . . . Yes, Nichols, the editor of The Meridian. Though Nichols has been married for twenty years. Though Knauer and Nichols are rarely seen in public together.)

Marya wanted to learn the simultaneous translator’s sleight-of-hand before it was too late. She wanted to convert human pain into human words, she wanted to convert the memory of intense emotion in the past into intense emotion in the present, and to be herself unmoved. But she had begun to doubt her ability. She had certainly begun to doubt her strength. Already, since the impassioned opening sessions of the conference, her handwriting had altered several times and was not always intelligible. Even on a single page it varied—slanted to the right, slanted archly to the left, overlarge, coyly small, now script and now block print, peppered with dots that signaled dismay, despair, and exclamation points that signaled approximately the same responses. For long minutes at a time her mind went blank, and though she appeared to be listening to the delegates’ speeches in Portuguese and the translator’s English equivalent she really wasn’t hearing anything at all. The words riddled her like bullets but did not lodge in her flesh.