by Idra Novey
In Portuguese, Beatriz had technically written, what a man will deny himself until he won’t.
Emma had thought “can’t” made more sense than “won’t” for capturing the boldness and Brazilian spirit of the sentence. As she shivered at her desk in Pittsburgh, the winter creaking in through the windows while Miles snored in the next room, it felt indisputable. Santiago’s desire had to be imperative, to carry the weight of fact.
At least in English.
Roberto Rocha stared at the can of olives on his desk. It was the second offering of condiments he’d received from the supermarket across the street. Yet another of his ingratiating novelists had shown up to pitch a manuscript that the young man had read through only once himself. Rocha told him that if he spent as much time revising as he did fantasizing about his books being made into movies, maybe the press would’ve come close to breaking even at some point in the last seven years.
Such conversations were deadening his senses. He didn’t want an offering of canned olives. He wanted someone to show up with a manuscript so unprecedented it made the temperature in his body rise. An author whose sentences were so sublime they made his head ache, who could deliver an image so precise and true he responded with every atom in his body. To keep publishing books that meant nothing to him was turning him into a fraud. A braver man would’ve given up by now and let the press fold.
Excuse me, Roberto? Flavia stuck her head in the door, her dark glasses low on her nose. Editora Record just called. They want to know if we’re going to reissue Beatriz Yagoda’s first two books, and said if we’re not they’d like to buy the rights to them. They can’t get her latest book into the stores fast enough.
Because the poor woman disappeared into a tree?
And that picture of her son.
He is quite the Adonis, isn’t he?
Rocha had known that Marcus was going to be exceptional-looking. Beatriz had known it as well, but was too modest to say such a thing about her own child. She spoke with equal modesty about her writing, and never with the air of faux modesty so many of his young writers cultivated now. With Beatriz, modesty wasn’t a performance. It was a given, a gracefulness.
Tell Record they can’t have the rights, Rocha said. In fact, tell them next Friday we’re rereleasing the books ourselves.
Next Friday? Flavia’s eyes widened behind her lenses, but Rocha didn’t pay attention. He was already considering the best approach to the new cover. He’d need something sleeker but with a deliciousness—an image of cutlery, perhaps, in silver. If he paid Eduardo extra, they could keep the printers going over the weekend and into the evenings. They could hire trucks to deliver the first copies to a few select stores to build excitement. Several years ago, he’d considered reissuing the early novels that Beatriz had published with him but had worried it would make him look desperate—out to remind everyone how relevant he’d once been—and then her last book did so poorly. She wasn’t visible anymore, or not until she disappeared.
See if Eduardo can meet this afternoon, Rocha said. No, revise that. Tell him I’ll be in his office today at three. We’ve got to race on this. Once the Comando Vermelho kidnaps their next banker, the media will move on.
There’s also this. Flavia held out a small envelope. You said you wanted to see any personal mail as soon as it came in.
Rocha slit open the envelope in one stroke, his fleshy hands moving with a new ferocity. Folded inside was a room service menu from a hotel in Salvador da Bahia. On the very bottom someone had written a single sentence—If you can’t, I understand—and signed below, S. Martins.
Eduardo at three, please, Rocha said. And Flavia, dear, why don’t you take those olives?
Whether she took them or not, he didn’t notice. “Santiago Martins” had affected his sleep. It had been so heartbreakingly Brazilian: a transvestite convinced that the only reason he dressed in women’s clothes was to stay hidden from the police. Beatriz had attended to the details with her inimitable vividness: Santiago’s dismay at how his back hair caught on the metal zipper of his dress, the assured way he maneuvered the ladle at his food cart while filling bowls with shrimp moqueca for the better-looking tourists, his gestures as feminine as those of any of the women vendors in their starched white Baiana dresses along the promenade.
Years after the police had forgotten his crimes, there was Santiago Martins—still ironing his starched white dress at night, still gossiping in the morning with the other women as they bought dendê oil and dried shrimp and predicted how brutally the sun would burn by noon.
And one night there was Santiago buying a nightgown for his mother and Santiago pulling the nightgown over his head in the privacy of his room. Santiago feeling the satin pour cool as milk down his back. Desire, Beatriz had written, was what a man will deny himself until he can’t. Rocha had convinced her to change the verb to “won’t.” He thought it was subtler, more nuanced. Beatriz hadn’t agreed, but she let him keep the change in. She knew that he loved the story but felt uneasy about publishing it. At the time, he’d been the only openly gay editor in Brazil.
Recalling the incident now, he reached for his wallet. How often did one have the chance to rewrite the hesitations of the past? He would reissue the book with Beatriz’s original choice and get it out faster than Record ever could. She’d never quite achieved as much bewildering wonder in her later books as she had in the first two she’d published with him. With this reprint, he’d put those early books on the map for good. He’d get them displayed in the front window of every Livraria Cultura in Rio and São Paulo.
First, of course, he’d have to call up the hotel in Salvador listed on the room service menu and pay for S. Martins to stay on another ten days. Once that was arranged, he’d get the new cover done, place the necessary calls to the magazines. He’d remind the country that it was Editora Eco that had launched two of the most startling new works of fiction of the last thirty years. Then, with dignity, with elegance, he’d let whoever still read literature in Rio come by and empty the office of its remaining volumes, and that would be it.
He’d put on his hat and turn off the lights.
Raquel was the only one on the floor when she headed to the elevators. Thiago had gone home to his family hours ago. He’d told her that they could look into the settlement offer from the strikers at the potash mine in the morning. She’d stayed on anyway. As long as she was in the office, she could forget about her missing mother for five, even seven minutes at a time.
On Monday nights, she’d often met her mother at the food-by-the-kilo place around the corner. Over bolinhos and marinated asparagus, Raquel would unload her latest grievance about the media and whatever mining incident they were exaggerating now.
Eventually, she’d ask about her mother’s day and her mother would talk about her persimmon trees on the balcony, smile timidly, and then bite the tip off one of the asparagus stems on her plate.
Although her mother had given evasive answers like this for years, they still made Raquel feel uneasy and untrusted. To avoid getting angry, she had come to avoid any direct questions about her mother’s writing. Chickens laid eggs. Cows and goats produced milk. Every six or seven years her mother produced a book. Of all the unreliable things about her mother, this pattern had remained unchanged. It was as true to her mother’s mysterious nature as it was of a palm to produce coconuts.
Even if she never read them, Raquel had appreciated her mother’s books for the sureness of their arrival, for proving that her mother was a functioning person, and despite the reputed darkness people found so alarming in her work, in person her mother was reassuring. All her writer friends thought they stopped by out of admiration for what she wrote, but Raquel was certain that they came more for the attentive way her mother listened to them and their pretentious ideas. Standing now outside the revolving doors of PetroXM, Raquel felt confident that her mother would return eventually and resume her life. She would come back quietly and without any apologies or solution
s, but she would come back.
Buoyed by this thought, Raquel hailed a cab to Copacabana. There was no reason she couldn’t go to the cheap food-by-the-kilo spot near her mother’s anyway, and who knew? Maybe her mother would be sitting at their usual table, waiting for Raquel to find her there. She felt so relieved by this fantasy that she rolled down the window to take in the breeze. She could taste the ocean in it the way it was blowing tonight, rinsing away the stink Thiago liked to call the sweaty ass of Rio.
At the corner before the restaurant, she got out and thought of something she could text him about the strike that really couldn’t wait until tomorrow. She was punching in the words on her phone when something yanked at her neck and pulled her off the sidewalk and into a recessed doorway. It was a man’s arm, closing around her throat so fast there was no time to cry out. The man already had her crushed against him, her face to the wall, the muzzle of his gun pushing into her back.
You need to tell your brother and that translator to stop screwing around and get the money, you hear me? he said from behind her, breathing into her ear.
She tried to say yes but his arm was still tight around her throat.
I said did you hear me? the man repeated, and then the muzzle of the gun was no longer against her back and she heard a knife snap open, and his other arm appeared, bringing the blade to her neck. Get the money, he said, or one of you is done, amiga. They will gun you down. This visit is a favor, eh? You hear what I’m saying?
A few feet away, she heard people strolling by, one of them laughing. If she screamed, they’d surely hear her, but maybe it would increase the chance that he’d panic and slit her throat. Or they wouldn’t come for her. Not on a run-down side street in Copacabana, not at ten in the evening.
Then as suddenly as the man had gripped her throat he let go. He was gone. For a moment, Raquel didn’t move. She just stood there bracing for something more, something worse. Someone had urinated recently on the slats of cardboard under her feet and the doorway smelled horrible. She hadn’t registered the smell until the man let go but didn’t know if she should leave yet. What if the man was still lurking nearby, waiting to see where she’d go or who she might call? She pictured her mother dragged into a recessed doorway like this one, full of garbage reeking of urine, imagined how long her mother would have remained there, trembling.
At the thought, Raquel forced herself out onto the sidewalk. A man blurred by on a bicycle and she cried out in alarm. From the jutting hill of a near favela came the stutter of shots of an assault rifle. For a second, the single seam of streetlights running through the favela gleamed brighter. Then the seam folded into the dark.
The whole way to her mother’s, Raquel sensed someone waiting for her. He was behind the bus, or pretending to read the headlines at the news kiosk. He was the young man lurching toward her in a blue muscle shirt, or the older one in a cheap suit swearing into his phone.
Another block went by and no one jumped her.
Then another.
In five minutes, she would be able to double-lock the doors and eat bowls of cereal in her mother’s kitchen. If no one grabbed her before then, if she didn’t have a panic attack, she could spend the night in her old room. She’d already passed Belíssima Fashion and the Unibanco. With each building, fewer men looked as though they were waiting to cut her throat. She took in the red stilettos on sale at Lulu’s and the window after that, at the bookstore Livraria Cultura—where suddenly there was her mother’s face, blown up on a poster wide as a windshield, her unsettling green eyes magnified to the size of headlights.
Next to her mother’s face was an equally gigantic image of the cover of her last novel: a sandwich filled with tiny people squirming out the sides like fruitworms. Raquel had told her mother that the cover was too disturbing, that readers wouldn’t want to pick it up, and she’d been right. The book had been her mother’s least popular in years.
Although now, on the other side of the window, a woman in a Lycra sundress was picking up a copy and a man with a jowly face and mustache was waiting behind her to do the same. As they lifted the books from the stack, Raquel saw her mother’s face again, smaller, on the back of each copy and remembered her mother’s visit a few weeks ago, the Band-Aid on her neck. How long ago had it been? Her mother had said it was just a cut, that she’d gotten the rooster skin on her old neck caught in a zipper. But maybe it had been the knife of one of Flamenguinho’s men. Maybe he’d nicked her as a warning, or it had been the second time he’d pulled her mother off the street and the message had been, This time I will break your skin. From now on, if I let you go, you will be bleeding.
Beatriz was not on the far side of the island either. Emma knew it as soon as the boat nosed up to the dock. There was only one street and nothing along it but stillness and a few tin-roofed buildings. One of them had a sign out front that said it was a restaurant, but it contained only one table, on top of which sat a pair of roosting chickens. As for the prison, a jungled-over path led her and Marcus to a mossy zigzag of crumbling walls. The closest thing they encountered to Beatriz’s orchestra of animals was a flock of fanged bats hissing upside down in an archway.
I’m so sorry, Emma said, coming to a stop in the shade of a guava tree to wipe her face. Online it hadn’t been clear that all the hotels were on the other side of the island, she said. But still, I shouldn’t have dragged you here and caused problems with your sister.
You didn’t drag me. Marcus shrugged. I knew it was unlikely we’d find her here, but wherever she is will seem unlikely and Raquel knows the only way to find her is to be a little impulsive.
Marcus twisted one of the guavas off the tree. Thumbing off the skin, he told Emma about a time in high school when his mother stopped cooking or buying food. On one of his trips to the supermarket with his sister, several weeks into the problem, Raquel was yelling about their mother being weak and indulgent then abruptly turned to Marcus and said, Turkey. He went to find it, assuming she was going to try to make their mother’s vatapá. When they got home, they found their mother in the kitchen grinding peanuts for the sauce, a can of coconut milk already out on the counter.
Neither of us had called to tell her about the turkey, Marcus said. But you must know this about my mother, eh? You have to be patient with her, but also trust your instincts, no?
Emma was about to agree when Marcus abruptly peeled off his sweaty T-shirt. She tried to look politely away. By the time he’d run the shirt up his chest and over the sweat on his back, her effort at restraint had failed completely. The front of her tank top was damp now as well. Even in the shade, the heat was so intense it seemed to be emanating from the stones.
I suppose, she said, this is why they called it the Devil’s Cauldron.
Oh, I bet they had far worse names for it than that. Marcus laughed and crouched to examine the blocks of years somebody had etched into one of the stones. This guy must have been a Communist, or maybe a murderer.
At “murderer,” they both fell silent. The image of the bulging gun in Flamenguinho’s jacket resurfaced in Emma’s mind, as he must have intended. And here she was, wasting two days over some passing idea that had made her feel smart on the plane.
When they reached the lone restaurant, Marcus said he was too ravenous to wait and eat on the other side of the island, and Emma felt too embarrassed about the futility of the trip to disagree. Inside, the chickens were clucking around under the table and there was now a tremendous white pig slumbering beside the cash register.
Emma was about to remark that it looked as though nobody was working today and they’d have to wait after all when a small girl emerged from the kitchen swinging a plastic doll by its hair. Marcus asked the girl if she or her companion might know something about lunch.
The girl said her mother had a fish stew going on the stove and Marcus said marvelous, they’d take two bowls. Given the hygiene standards of the establishment, Emma was about to say a second bowl wouldn’t be necessary when the girl a
bruptly spun around and disappeared back into the kitchen. Marcus, still shirtless, said he was going to check in with the boatman at the dock waiting to take them back to the other side. Left alone at the wobbly table, Emma tried not to think about how ravenous she had become. One of the chickens pecked at her sandal and she kicked it away and felt ashamed.
She wished she’d brought along something with words on it, even an old magazine from the hotel. Besides her water and sunscreen, all she had in her bag was her notebook.
So she opened it.
In: Preposition. Used to indicate inclusion in a physical space or within something abstract or immaterial: in a panic, for example, or in a fantasy taking place while sitting between a sleeping pig and a pair of chickens, one of which has just relieved itself on the floor.
The fish moqueca. Emma felt it rising in her throat as soon as the ferry began to move. In one heave at the railing, she returned the fish to the sea.
Ai, Emma! Marcus grabbed her arm so she wouldn’t tip over the railing. You should drink some water. Come. He began to lead her toward the stairs up to the snack bar but Emma felt too queasy to climb them.
I’ll wait here, she said, flopping on a pile of emergency rafts. On the way to the island, she hadn’t noticed how often the ferry rocked beneath them, but she felt it now, every tiny rise and fall. It was possible, she recognized in her nauseous state, that she had nothing at all to offer in the search for her author. To avoid further embarrassment, she needed to book a flight home tomorrow. She’d call Miles and apologize for letting his emails go unanswered. They’d lived together this long, knew which mug the other preferred for coffee and which for tea. There was no reason she could not go with him to speak to caterers and commit to a wedding date.
