Ways to Disappear
Page 4
Horizontal on the emergency rafts, her eyes closed, she was nearly convinced. She could be grateful for Miles and his steadiness. They would delight in exercise and recycling.
Then Marcus returned, leaning over her with a bottle of water still wet from where it had been submerged in ice. He asked if he should leave her to rest there a little longer and she knew that the appropriate answer was yes. But to reach his wrist was a matter of inches and there were her fingers, already trickling up his arm. To kiss her author’s son just once, atop a pile of emergency rafts, didn’t have to mean anything.
Unless she did it again.
And then again in the last row of the bus back to Rio.
And in the taxi from the bus terminal, in the brief darkness of the tunnel into Copacabana.
This will have to stop, she said.
As for Marcus, he left his hand where it was, between her legs.
Between: Preposition. 1. By the common action of
At 4 a.m., Raquel stopped reading. She was two hundred pages into what was, or was not, the novel her mother had been working on when she staged her vanishing into the tree. Until this evening, Raquel had only gone into her mother’s poker accounts on the computer. She’d left the Word documents closed, but that had been before she’d been dragged, gagging, into a doorway. She was so tired that she had to read each sentence three times but knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she got to the end of it. The novel was set in the seventies, the pages alternating between the same two scenes again and again. In each telling, the scenes devolved into long stretches of random numbers and letters as if her mother had lost control of her hands, the pages filling with 3r#$T$)_4tg09NGJOP!@#)%$*PGM:-t-gtkltpjhhjIasd920-4tiu34-tu3y5-2y-u9jgdfpgj, and on and on.
It was the work of a broken person, somebody too bewildered by her own thoughts to punch in anything but nonsense. Both scenes were about a woman who’d graduated from a university in Rio in the early seventies, as Raquel’s mother had. The first scene took place at Cine Paissandu, the movie house where artsy types had brooded and commiserated during the dictatorship. In every version of the scene, something went wrong with the film: the reel broke or the sound system started to garble. While the audience waited for things to resume, the woman stepped into the alley behind the theater for a cigarette. The other smokers headed back inside, but she was too restless to join them. She sat down on the step for another cigarette in the alley, assuming she was alone.
But she wasn’t. There was a shadow. It drew closer and—
The sentence stopped, unfinished. After a page break, the same scene began again with the same woman alone in the same alley. Sometimes it took seven pages to get to the shadow, sometimes just a paragraph, but every time the shadow was about to reach the woman, her mother’s words came to an end.
In each version of the scene, things began identically, except the woman stepped into the alley wearing a blue linen dress instead of a cotton one. Or she was wearing a skirt. Or she’d placed her cigarette in her left hand instead of her right. As if it was only a matter of getting the right attire or placement of the cigarette to alter what happened next.
But the shadow kept approaching anyway, and the painfully precise descriptions of the woman’s clothing would continue, down to the square shape of the metal buttons on her blouse and the name of the maid who had pressed the shirt for her that morning, and then the shadow closed in, clamping his hand over her mouth, and the passage broke off again, unfinished.
The next page would be either another version or a different scene completely, set in Salvador da Bahia with what seemed like the same woman but married with a baby and on holiday. The three of them were sitting at a busy restaurant by the ocean. In every version of the second scene, the father banged his hand on the table and told the woman to stop gazing off. He ridiculed her for choosing a restaurant with such small portions and poor service—the sort of comments Raquel’s father had made in restaurants.
Or the man Raquel had assumed was her father. Especially after he died, people had remarked on how little she looked like him. Of course, they’d said the same about her mother. So who is it you look like? her friends’ parents always asked after seeing her next to her mother and Marcus. She’d always found it curious that her mother had married her father so quickly after meeting him and had taken his last name. Maybe it was to erase any doubts about his paternity.
Or maybe this half-finished story was fiction and only the details bore a resemblance to their family. For all Raquel knew, her mother’s drafts always broke off this way at difficult moments until her mother figured out what she wanted to do next. In the restaurant scene, just when it seemed as though the woman and her husband were about to have it out with each other, the woman would flee into some surreal description of the fish on her plate winking up at her with its oily eye, or of the man seated at the next table reading a yellowed newspaper from seventy-three years ago. Or her mother would simply write CHECK ON THIS, as if the date of the newspaper or the kind of fish staring up at the woman from her plate mattered tremendously.
Raquel rubbed at her temples. She’d always known if she read her mother’s fiction it would be devastating or alienating or both. What she needed was to lie down and take a break. The further in she read, the more the scenes devolved into frustrating trails of random letters: two words and then AOGFH$#T)IGR… and then a description of a waiter’s shoes and then ^OIEWQJGFLDGASDFJHEWR#$TIGJG)GJGTJBHT)TH)L:O))#$*()U_)ORGNGWE@#)R*… and on and on, filling the pages where the rest of the novel should have been.
Raquel wondered which of her mother’s friends would know if the story about the shadow and the alley was true. Maybe none of them would know, or maybe her mother had confided in some unreliable writer friend during one of her slumps, and that friend had told all the others. Maybe the disdain Raquel had sensed that her mother’s friends felt about her lack of interest in literature wasn’t disdain at all, but unease with what they knew about her and she didn’t. Maybe it was pity—a possibility that made her despise them even more.
But this mess of unfinished sentences on her mother’s computer wasn’t a book for other readers, or it wasn’t yet. If the scene in the alley was true, it belonged to her as much as it did to her mother. And to no one else.
Rocha pulled out his most trusted saucepan and a bottle of his favorite Chilean Carmenere, the unparalleled Veramonte, which he’d chilled overnight. Out past the kitchen, Alessandro had turned up the Salieri aria playing on their gramophone, Prima la musica, poi le parole, and had stretched out on the couch with the newspaper.
Ave Maria, Alessandro said. Did you see this? He held up the cover of the gossip section for Rocha to read. It was another photo of Beatriz’s son and her American translator on the Ilha Grande ferry, only this time the young woman appeared to be vomiting over the railing.
Ai, que vulgar. Rocha took the page from Alessandro to study it more closely. It was the third paper this week with a feature on Beatriz and her continuing absence. He’d always thought there was nothing better for a writer’s reputation than dying. But even more promising than dying, it seemed, was to magnificently disappear.
Which gave him an idea.
The idea, at least in the elevator, was to have sex just once before letting Raquel know they were back in Rio. Only once, Emma said twice, just to get it out of our systems. Then we can really focus on finding your mother without distracting each other. Sex just once in his mother’s sweltering apartment and that would be it.
When they opened the door, however, the apartment wasn’t sweltering at all. It was cool, the air-conditioning humming in every room, though Emma was certain she had turned it off before leaving for Ilha Grande.
Raquel must have come by and forgotten to turn it off, Marcus said. Come here. He
pulled at her hips until she tilted toward him. If they’d been standing anywhere but in front of her author’s bookshelves, the titles she’d run her fingers over for years like sacred scrolls, Emma was sure she would have had more restraint, would not be lifting her own dress this way over her head.
When Marcus slid her polka-dot underwear down over her knees, she murmured something about thinking about this a little more. But she didn’t want to think. She wanted to fling her underwear down the hall with her toe.
So she did, and the motion was divine.
Now there was nothing in the way.
On the balcony, Raquel was well into her third bowl of Sucrilhos. There hadn’t been anything else that had appealed to her in her mother’s fridge, and nothing that could satisfy like bingeing on a box of frosted flakes.
And so it was with a constellation of soggy Sucrilhos floating across the milk in her bowl that she stepped back into the apartment and heard panting. A distinct knocking coming from the hallway as the rhythm got faster, the panting more pronounced. Raquel clenched her spoon as she raged into the living room, milk swishing over the lip of her bowl.
Meu Deus, Marcus! she shouted, and began to sob. Someone had just pressed a knife to her neck. It was possible her father was a hideous stranger in an alley. And now here was her brother, thrusting himself into their mother’s translator, knocking their mother’s beloved books to the floor.
We’re all going to be killed, you idiots. Don’t you get it?
His eyes wide, Marcus extracted himself from Emma and turned, leaving Raquel to stare at her brother fully erect in a textured condom the purplish pink of bubble gum.
Caralho, Marcus, she said, put your pau away. Beside him, Emma was already yanking her dress over her head so frantically that she knocked down several large books that had been sitting on top of the shelf behind her. As they crashed to the floor, an envelope fluttered out and slid across the hallway, disappearing under the opposite shelf. Any other week, Raquel would have dismissed the envelope as more of her mother’s endless clutter and left it there.
But everything was filled with portent now, could be the distance between seeing her mother again and not.
Move the shelf, Marcus, hurry up, she ordered. What are you waiting for?
Bare as he’d arrived twenty-nine years ago at Hospital Geral de Bonsucesso, Marcus tugged and pulled at the shelf, but the books were tightly packed and shelved three deep. Even with Raquel’s help, it was too heavy to budge.
Emma got on her knees and began pulling out handfuls of books to lighten the shelf. Raquel had never felt less inclined to join forces with her mother’s translator, but she did it, making a point of pulling out the books faster and harder, knocking Emma’s stacks out of her way.
When they’d finally extracted enough books to move the shelf, Raquel made sure she was the one who got to the letter first. It was postmarked a year ago and from Rio. She couldn’t think of who in the same city would bother to send her mother a letter until she pulled out the engraved card inside. Of course. It was from her mother’s pretentious first editor, Roberto. The card contained nothing but fussy details about a dinner party and what would be served.
It’s nothing, Raquel said. Just a frivolous card from a friend about a party. She tossed it in the tin trash can by the TV. She knew that Emma was going to retrieve it but wouldn’t dare reach into the garbage until Raquel had left the room. How could she, with her polka-dot underwear hanging from the handle of an umbrella by the door?
Raquel crossed her arms and stared out at the persimmon trees on the balcony. She couldn’t make Emma leave. But she could make her wait.
To: eneufeld@pitt.edu
Subject: Re: alive?
Emma, vanishing like this is crazy. Your parents said they haven’t heard from you either. Julia from your department has left a hundred messages on the landline saying you need to confirm your office hours ASAP for the spring semester. I’m sorry I flipped out on the way to the airport but what you’re doing now is cruel. You need to answer. I’m sure everyone in Beatriz’s family is grateful you’re there and you’ve been a tremendous help. Just tell me where you are.
Hidden in the guest room, Emma enjoyed her findings quietly. It had been excruciating to wait for Raquel to leave the room but it had been worth it. She was so jittery from reading Rocha’s card that she’d stopped trying to hear what Raquel was telling Marcus in the kitchen. It was too hard to make out what they were saying from two rooms away. All she could gather was that Raquel was going to leave in the morning and Marcus wanted to go as well, but Raquel kept saying no, that he had become too much of a liability after getting his picture in all the gossip columns. Neither of them had mentioned Emma’s appearance in the photos as well, which was a relief, though also insulting and dismissive—a conflict of emotions that was standard fare for a translator. Emma had come to find the unease this conflict produced in her curiously alluring. She couldn’t help winding herself tighter and tighter around it like a thread around a spool.
At one point, she thought she heard Marcus suggest that if they were going to pursue something based on their mother’s writing, they had to admit that Emma knew much more about their mother as a writer than they did.
Or perhaps that was just what Emma wanted to overhear.
In any case, she had her triumph in this card on her lap, elegantly written in the formidable script of Roberto Rocha. She hadn’t known that Beatriz had stayed in touch with him after moving on to her trade publisher in Portugal. The card was mostly gossip and exhaustive descriptions of entrées. But in one of the paragraphs, after an elaborate report on a lemongrass sauce for chicken kebabs, Rocha wrote, All of this is to say we’ll be having chicken when you come next week, my dear. As for your phone call, you know I’m always here to serve as your Gonzaga.
Emma knew of only one Gonzaga in Brazilian literature. To confirm her hunch, she clicked out of her email, away from Miles and the urgent requests from Julia for her office hours. The information floated up from the turbid sea of Google trivia: twenty-six hits for Antonio Gonzaga, youngest son of the Gonzaga mining empire in the state of Minas Gerais, benefactor of various modernismo writers and the cubist painter Vera Coutinho.
She typed in Roberto Rocha next, something quickening inside her. Before she could find the website for Rocha’s press, she had to scroll through pages of lifestyle articles about various extravagant Rocha siblings—one who’d bought a $50,000 Italian wedding gown and one who traveled only by helicopter and threw wild parties on his three-story yacht. After all the glitz of his brothers and sisters, the website for Rocha’s press seemed not just outdated but primitive. It featured nothing but a list of titles. There were no pictures of the authors, no links or blurbs. The only image on the page was a picture of the ornate colonial building on Rua Francisco Sá that housed the press, a photograph that seemed to say, We are above websites and embedded links. Look at what we own.
If Beatriz had asked Rocha to be her Gonzaga before, it was hard to imagine she wouldn’t go to him for money now. Raquel had said that all her mother’s accounts were overdrawn. Whatever cash Beatriz had taken with her into that almond tree was going to run out. That is, if she hadn’t sought out her Gonzaga already.
Emma got up from the bed to share her idea with Marcus and Raquel but stopped at the door. It would be better to tell Marcus later, alone. Or even better just to go and say nothing in case she was completely wrong again. She didn’t want to lead them astray a second time or repeat that humiliation. She could just stick to her story of leaving in the morning for Pittsburgh, which she couldn’t follow through on now, not after this card from Rocha. For a second, she forced her mind back to Shadyside, to her drafty bedroom, Miles grinding his teeth beside her in the dark, the radiator banging in the basement as if someone were trapped and thrashing inside it with a giant stack of pots. No, she couldn’t go, not yet.
Sitting back down on one of the twin beds in the guest room, she opened her
journal to a new page. CHAPTER TWO: JACKPOT.
Jackpot: Americanism; of uncertain origin. 1. A substantial win following a gamble. 2. A sudden influx of fortune that may lead a person to reconsider how much she is willing to risk next, as in: After a poor choice or two, the American translator, like others in her country, has been known to go to extraordinary lengths to prove she, too, can hit the jackpot. See also: stubborn. 3. A word used to justify risking more in pursuit of something unlikely. See also: redemption.
Editora Eco was a landfill of manuscripts. Emma had never seen so many stacks of yellowed, languishing pages in a single place. Maybe Rocha was trying to scare new writers away. On top of one of the stacks someone had left a rather sad-looking can of olives.
Can I help you? the receptionist asked from behind a pillar of books and manuscripts beside her desk.
Bom dia, Emma said. Is Roberto Rocha in today?
He just left for Salvador. What was it you needed?
I came to ask him about… Emma paused, having just noticed the book lying next to the receptionist’s phone. Is that a Beatriz Yagoda novel?
Yes, we’re rereleasing Have You Tasted the Butterflies. Isn’t it gorgeous? The girl handed the book to Emma. The new cover was sleek and minimal, with nothing on it but a silver fork and matching slender spoon. It looked like an image of a remodeled kitchen in Architectural Digest and couldn’t have been more at odds with the lush chaos of leafy plants on the original cover from the seventies. Over the two years it had taken Emma to translate the book, she’d come to know those plants as intimately as the pores on her nose.
Everybody’s rushing to reissue her books now that she’s disappeared, the girl said, and then leaned forward, as if she’d just heard a curious sound under the floor. You were in the pictures on the ferry with her son, in the newspaper. You’re her translator, the American.