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The Tally

By Anne Enright

One year in the early nineteen-seventies, when I was a child of eight or nine, my mother came back from the annual Christmas food shopping looking thoughtful. This trip to the supermarket was the most carefully planned of the year: savings were expended, there were lists within lists and much fretfulness. Parking was a worry, stock often ran low, and something was always forgotten or mysteriously consumed by the trolley, because it was not in the shopping bags when they were unpacked at home.

二十世纪七十年代初的某一年，我大概八九岁，母亲从一年一度的圣诞节食品采购回来，一脸若有所思。这次去超市是她一年中最精心策划的一次：她花光了积蓄，列了好几层购物清单，心里充满了焦虑。停车是个难题，商品经常缺货，而且总有东西被遗忘，或者莫名其妙地被购物车吞掉——因为回到家打开购物袋时，这些东西根本不在里面。

This year, my mother was, at first, pleased with the final bill, and then more and more confused. She checked the tally several times. She took a pen and went through the items she had bought, ticking each one off on the receipt, which was many feet long. Then she drove back to the supermarket to say that she had been undercharged for the turkey by, she estimated, ten Irish pounds. The manager was summoned. He checked her figures and rang up the balance for the turkey. He asked if he could keep her annotated receipt “for training purposes,” and gave her a box of chocolates for it, really nice ones.

那一年，母亲起初对最终的账单很满意，但随后却越来越困惑。她反复核对了好几遍。她拿起笔，把买的东西一件件地在长长的收据上勾掉。然后，她开车回到超市，说火鸡的价格少了，她估计少了十英镑。经理被叫了过来。他核对了她的账目，然后把火鸡的差价算了出来。他问能不能把她那张做了批注的收据留下来“用于培训”，还送了她一盒巧克力作为补偿，是很精致的那种。

It was all a bit mad, we thought, but my mother was adamant. “I couldn’t have eaten it,” she said. “I just couldn’t sit down on Christmas Day, of all days, and eat a turkey I had not paid for.”

我们觉得这事儿有点儿荒唐，但我母亲态度坚决。“我根本吃不下，”她说，“我怎么能在圣诞节这天，吃一只我没付过钱的火鸡呢？”

Though I liked the excitement of the free chocolates, I felt the loss of my mother’s amazingly long till receipt. It seemed to me that the manager had taken something from her—her story, or her goodness—for the purpose of “training” people who were surely not good, because their first interest was in profit. Why was she so obedient to the system? I worried that she would be patronized by those people as well as admired.

虽然免费巧克力让我很兴奋，但我还是为母亲那张长长的收据的丢失感到惋惜。我觉得经理从她身上拿走了些什么——她的故事，或者她的善良——用来“培训”那些肯定不善良的人，因为他们首先考虑的是利润。她为什么对这套体系如此顺从？我担心她会被这些人轻视，也会被他们敬佩。

Perhaps as a result, I grew to dislike supermarket managers as a breed. These were invariably young men in suits with nametags that said “Mr. This” and “Mr. That,” while the women who worked the checkouts, often old enough to be their mothers, had nametags that said “Sheila” or “Mary.” I also realized that this anecdote about my mother’s return to the chaos of a supermarket right before Christmas was not one that most people enjoyed or wanted to hear. What was I trying to say? That my mother was a fool?

也许正因如此，我开始讨厌超市经理这个群体。这些人无一例外都是穿着西装的年轻男子，胸前佩戴着写有“某某先生”或“某某先生”的名牌；而收银员，年纪往往大得足以做他们的母亲，胸前佩戴着写有“希拉”或“玛丽”的名牌。我也意识到，我母亲在圣诞节前夕重返超市的这段经历，大多数人并不喜欢听，也不想听。我到底想表达什么？想说我母亲是个傻瓜吗？

Ireland being what it is, when, in my twenties, I got a job as a television producer, one of my first assignments was on a travel show featuring the owner of the supermarket chain, a man called Feargal Quinn. He was an affable, smooth business type. A Catholic who would later be knighted by the Pope, he had old-school values, but seemed to enjoy new company and fresh opinions, of which I had, at that age, a ready supply. In between staged lunches and helicopter shoots over the châteaux of the Loire, we had arguments about employee nametags and sanctions on oranges from apartheid-era South Africa. One evening, I told him the story of my mother’s Christmas till receipt and he asked me where in Dublin she did her shopping.

爱尔兰就是这样，在我二十多岁的时候，我找到了一份电视制片人的工作。我的第一个任务之一，就是制作一档旅游节目，采访对象是这家连锁超市的老板，名叫费格尔·奎因。他是一位和蔼可亲、圆滑世故的商人。他是一位天主教徒，后来被教皇册封为爵士，拥有老派的价值观，但似乎也乐于结识新朋友，接受新观点——而我，在那个年纪，恰恰拥有源源不断的“新鲜血液”。在精心安排的午餐和卢瓦尔河谷城堡的直升机航拍间隙，我们争论着员工的姓名牌和对来自种族隔离时期南非的橙子的制裁。一天晚上，我跟他讲了我母亲圣诞节购物小票的故事，他问我母亲是在都柏林的哪家店买的。

“No,” he said when I told him, as though I’d got it all wrong.“That happened on the Northside. It was a woman in ...” and he named a different shop in the chain.

“不对，”我告诉他后，他却说，好像我完全搞错了似的。“那是在北区。是一个女人在……”然后他又说出了连锁店里的另一家店的名字。

I wanted to say (I probably did say) that I had not invented my own mother or stolen someone else’s, and that, if this story said anything, it was that the Enrights were not reared to be liars. I wanted to add that he could have the receipt and the tenner for the damn turkey but not the truth—that was still, somehow, mine.

我想说（我可能确实说了），我没有捏造自己的母亲，也没有盗用别人的故事，而且，如果这个故事说明了什么，那就是恩赖特一家从小就没有被教育要说谎。我还想补充一点，他可以拿走那张小票和那该死的火鸡的十英镑，但拿不走真相——真相，不知怎的，仍然属于我。

Now that I think about it, he may have said that the receipt had been on the wall in the manager’s office on the Northside for years. So there was either a superfluity of honest Dublin women back in the day or a manager who moved around.

现在想想，他可能说过那张小票已经在北区经理办公室的墙上挂了好几年了。所以，要么是当年都柏林诚实的女性太多了，要么就是经理到处跑。

I am not thrilled that my mother’s shopping list was an object of corporate interest. I am not delighted by my family’s continuing probity, in an age of predatory capitalism. Still, integrity is also a way to hold the self together. Some days, you just can’t eat the turkey. Honesty may be a one-sided contract with the world, but it is the only side that we can control.

我母亲的购物清单竟然成了公司关注的对象，这让我很不高兴。在这个资本主义盛行的时代，我的家人依然保持着正直的品格，这也不让我感到欣慰。不过，正直也是维系自我的一种方式。有时候，你就是吃不下火鸡。诚实或许是与世界签订的一份单方面契约，但却是我们唯一能够掌控的一方。

After the filming was done, Feargal Quinn sent me a hamper, by way of thanks. It was delivered, by his personal driver, to my mother’s house, in a nice display of suburban glamour. She found the chauffeur’s cap particularly fetching. I have no idea why Quinn sent it to her address, when I did not live there anymore.

拍摄结束后，费格尔·奎因送了我一个礼篮以表谢意。他的私人司机把它送到我母亲家，颇具郊区奢华风范。她觉得司机的帽子特别好看。我不明白奎因为什么要把礼篮寄到她家，因为我已经不住在那儿了。