The Summer Guest Read Online Free

curious, made her look forward to sitting down to work each day, and this would be no exception, she sensed. But at the same time, she was eager to find out why the diary must be kept confidential, whether there was something more in the text, something remarkable, that might bring her to another level professionally, propel her ever so briefly into the limelight that eluded most translators by definition. She did have a few colleagues who translated Nobel laureates and prizewinning authors; they were interviewed, wrote blogs or books, mingled at conferences as speakers. Their lives seemed to have substance.
    She had had enough of being invisible, of slipping inconspicuously behind the more glamorous author whose photograph beckoned from the back cover of a book they had both written. As translator, she mused, she was no more than the lining of the dust jacket. This substance she craved—beyond meaningful texts, beyond creativity—should lead to an identity.
    She turned to head home, wind at her back, and looking at the darkening landscape, she knew instinctively that it was not enough to have lived this long in France or to have acquired a French passport to feel French; perhaps it was equally foolish to expect an identity from her profession. Although people often did, and their profession defined them—to others, to society. A sort of representational convenience, when in fact the true self was elsewhere: going for walks at twilight, talking to the cat.
    Ana had read somewhere that if you wanted your cat to meow, to converse with you, you had to talk to it. As if it were a furry plant. She had never had a cat before—had adopted Doodle some six months earlier—and she was as disconcerted by the creature’s sudden displays of affection as she was by its self-serving indifference. In the end, such unpredictability was proving instructive. In the morning she would turn to the cat and say, Right, Doodle, what sort of day are we in for?, and Doodle’s condescending stare would tell her all she needed to know. For twenty years, Ana had lived a life of unquestioning routine and not a little boredom. She had been happiest crafting the very literary translations she favored back then: poetry, memoirs, obscure novels that sold a few hundred copies at best. She had spent her days bent over her typewriter, and then the computer, like some maître horloger over his instruments. Mathieu had resented her for it—the hours she spent, the pecuniary pointlessness of it. Now she worked much harder than she ever had, but she was free; she need fear neither routine nor boredom, and she felt a tremendous urge to make up for lost time.
    What was most surprising to her, after three years on her own, was how little the absence of a relationship troubled her. In the distant past, before she had met Mathieu, any period of celibacy or recovery from a breakup had been a source of distress and worry; she lived with it, but with a terrible awareness of inadequacy and time passing. Now time was passing faster than ever, yet Ana was poised and cheerfully resigned. She surveyed the rubble of her romantic yearnings with the dispassionate cynicism of the hardened aid worker. She had earned her name in the end. Harding. She didn’t think of herself as a hard person, but as a woman gracefully adjusting to the inevitable.
    You do what you have to do, her father used to say. Strange, coming from him, the precise, articulate professor of history. She didn’t like this catchall phrase, with its negative implication of just making do, the pis aller, but she could point to experience, if challenged. Perhaps others had her best interests in mind when they questioned her solitude, but they hadn’t lived her life. She always said she was open to new experiences, but maybe she no longer knew how to reach out in this increasingly crowded, competitive world. Or she didn’t feel she needed to reach out. Her profession suited