Include Me Out by María Sonia Cristoff

Author:María Sonia Cristoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Books
Published: 2019-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

THREE

SHE PICKS UP HER PACE, wants to arrive before it gets dark. Now that she has drawn up her sabotage plan, she reviews it: she already knows the schedules of the security guards, she already knows their preferences, what wine they like to drink, she already knows where they keep the key that the taxidermist returns to them every evening and that she will need at a particular time. It’s important that she use that key: in this town nobody loses track of what others do, much less if those others are newcomers, and she fears that if she takes the risk of making a copy, a single word from the locksmith will ruin everything. And, given the level of control over all the minutiae that her boss as well as the most introverted security guard have shown, she can’t take the risk of removing it for a few hours to make a copy somewhere else. Collecting the basic information she needed to plan each step took a lot less time than she had thought, which shouldn’t surprise her after years of devoting herself to a profession that in the final analysis does not consist of speaking two or three or several languages well, as one might think, but rather of grasping quickly what someone really wants to say whenever they say anything. Her pronunciation of the languages she translated wasn’t brilliant, she has to admit, but she also has to admit that in the art of perceiving that nucleus, she was infallible. And, since her perceptions were very quick, she had a lot of time shut away in her booth to observe the infinite number of discursive strategies and detours the orators used in order to present that nucleus at precisely the right moment, or to hide it, or to allude to it, or to elude it. She had a lot of time, in short, to understand manipulative discourse. So much so that during the free moments she had in her booth and in hotel rooms and at airports, she began to write her own manual of rhetoric. A manual of manipulative discourse, replete with linguistic examples, prototypes, and digressions. The part about well-documented examples and prototypes, she still believes, is what made everybody so nervous that day she decided to stop translating what was being said at the celebrated summit and instead started to read one of the chapters from her own manual. Though, as it turned out, she was able to read very little, because after exactly seven minutes, the security people removed her by force. Not even a colleague or one of the organizers, but rather the most blatant forces of law and order. A real pity because without a doubt those seven minutes figure among the happiest of her life. Unforgettable the stunned expressions on the faces of well-known journalists, international delegates, key figures, and the few other people who had been allowed into the hall that day when the great philanthropist of the day

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