原文: The Chameleon [TNY]

A local reporter, Xavier Sota, told me that since then Bourdin had periodically appeared in Pau, always in a different guise. Sometimes he had a mustache or a beard. Sometimes his hair was tightly cropped; at other times, it was straggly. Sometimes he dressed like a rapper, and on other occasions like a businessman. “It was as if he were trying to find a new character to inhabit,” Sota said.

Bourdin and I sat down on a bench near the train station, as a light rain began to fall. A car paused by the curb in front of us, with a couple inside. They rolled down the window, peered out, and said to each other, “Le Caméléon.”

“I am quite famous in France these days,” Bourdin said. “Too famous.”

Before he was Benjamin Kent or Michelangelo Martini—before he was the child of an English judge or an Italian diplomat—he was Frédéric Pierre Bourdin, the illegitimate son of Ghislaine Bourdin, who was eighteen and poor when she gave birth to him, in a suburb of Paris, on June 13, 1974. On government forms, Frédéric’s father is often listed as “X,” meaning that his identity was unknown. But Ghislaine, during an interview at her small house, in a rural area in western France, told me that “X” was a twenty-five-year-old Algerian immigrant named Kaci, whom she had met at a margarine factory where they both worked. (She says that she can no longer remember his last name.) After she became pregnant, she discovered that Kaci was already married, and so she left her job and did not tell him that she was carrying his child.

Ghislaine raised Frédéric until he was two and a half—“He was like any other child, totally normal,” she says—at which time child services intervened at the behest of her parents. A relative says of Ghislaine, “She liked to drink and dance and stay out at night. She didn’t want anything to do with that child.” Ghislaine insists that she had obtained another factory job and was perfectly competent, but the judge placed Frédéric in her parents’ custody. Years later, Ghislaine wrote Frédéric a letter, telling him, “You are my son and they stole you from me at the age of two. They did everything to separate us from each other and we have become two strangers.”

Frédéric says that his mother had a dire need for attention and, on the rare occasions that he saw her, she would feign being deathly ill and make him run to get help. “To see me frightened gave her pleasure,” he says. Though Ghislaine denies this, she acknowledges that she once attempted suicide and her son had to rush to find assistance.

As we spoke, his large brown eyes flitted across me, seemingly taking me in. One of his police interrogators called him a “human recorder.” To my surprise, Bourdin knew where I had worked, where I was born, the name of my wife, even what my sister and brother did for a living. “I like to know whom I’m meeting,” he said.

Aware of how easy it is to deceive others, he was paranoid of being a mark. “I don’t trust anybody,” he said. For a person who described himself as a “professional liar,” he seemed oddly fastidious about the facts of his own life. “I don’t want you to make me into somebody I’m not,” he said. “The story is good enough without embellishment.”

I knew that Bourdin had grown up in and around Nantes, and I asked him about his tattoo. Why would someone who tried to erase his identity leave a trace of one? He rubbed his arm where the words were imprinted on his skin. Then he said, “I will tell you the truth behind all my lies.”

To be continued...

译文: 千面人【纽约客】续 2

续：

千面人【纽约客】前奏 http://www.elanso.com/ArticleModule/HaJ2T3NiGTNiUKU0I5KAPAIi.html

一名当地的记者夏维尔·索塔（Xavier Sota）告诉我，从那以后布尔丹曾定期地出现在波城，每次都是不同的装束。有时是小胡子有时是山羊胡；有时紧紧地扎个马尾，有时头发是散开的；有时穿的像个说唱艺人，有时又像个商人。“他看起来像在为自己找寻新的角色，”索塔说。

布尔丹和我坐在火车站附近的一张长凳上，天上下起了小雨。一对夫妻开着辆车在我们前面的马路边停了下来。他们摇下窗户向外偷望了一眼，说了句：“是那个千面人。”

“我最近在法国非常出名，”布尔丹说：“太过出名了。”

说话时他用他棕色的大眼睛掠过我，似乎要把我吸进去似的。一个审讯他的警察把他叫做“人形记录机”。令我吃惊的是，布尔丹知道我在哪工作，在哪出生，我妻子的名字，还知道我的兄弟姐妹是做什么的。“我喜欢对我要见的人有所了解，”他说。

在他发现骗人是多么容易后，他就对被骗的看法很偏激。“我不相信任何人，”他说。对于一个把自己说成是“专职骗子”的人来说，他对如何描述他自己的真实生活似乎挑剔的很奇怪。“我不想你把我说的不像我自己，”他说：“我的故事不用修饰就已经够精彩了。”

我了解到布尔丹是在南特和南特附近长大的，所以问了关于他的纹身的问题。为什么一个想要抹除自己身份的人要留下一点痕迹？他揉了揉胳膊上刻着那些字的地方，然后开口道：“我会告诉你我所有谎言背后的事实。”

在他还不是本杰明·肯特或米开朗基罗·马天尼——一个英国法官的孩子或意大利外交官的儿子——之前，他叫做弗莱德里克·皮埃尔·布尔丹，是吉丝莲·布尔丹的私生子。1974年6月13号，在一片巴黎郊区，穷苦的吉丝莲18岁时生下了弗莱德里克。政府文件上弗莱德里克在父亲姓名栏总是填着“X”，表示父亲身份不明。但有一次我们在吉丝莲位于法国西部乡下的小房子里采访她时她说“X”其实是一个25岁的阿尔及利亚移民，他叫卡其（Kaci）。他们是在一间黄油厂工作时认识的（她说她已经不记得他的姓了）。她怀孕后发现卡其已经结婚了，所以她辞了工作，而且没告诉卡其她有了他的孩子就走了。

吉丝莲把弗莱德里克抚养到了两岁半——“他就像其他孩子一样很正常，”她说——后来在她父母的要求下少儿服务机构插手了此事。她的一个亲戚说吉丝莲“喜欢晚上出去酗酒，跳舞和闲晃，一点都不管那个孩子。”吉丝莲坚持说她在另一家工厂找到了工作，而她完全能够胜任那份工作，但是法院还是把监护权判给了她的父母。几年后，吉丝莲写了封信给弗莱德里克，跟他说：“你是我的儿子，他们在你两岁的时候把你从我身边偷走了。他们竭尽所能地要拆散我们，以至我们现在成了陌生人。”

弗莱德里克说他的母亲极端的想要受到关注。在他们极少的几次见面中，她总会装作病的很厉害然后让他去找人求救。“看到我害怕能让她觉得开心”他说。而吉丝莲否认了这种说法，不过她承认有一次她试图自杀，所以她儿子不得不冲出去找人帮忙。

未完待续……