by Idra Novey
The first time Rocha read the story, the terrifying conviction of those brothers reckoning with one another in the street stopped him cold. He’d been sitting in his office, and for a minute everything on his desk had an unsettling glimmer, like the scales on a just-killed fish or the glint of tinfoil floating on dark water in a well.
To: [email protected]
Subject: in the next five days
Senhora Neufeld,
If I don’t get my money this week, I’ll be kidnapping your friend Marcus and taking one of his ears as interest.
Why? Because it’s due. You’re taking too long. I treat all my debtors the same. I believe in equality. If someone doesn’t pay what they owe me, I go to their family. Unless, of course, there is an American with nice legs involved and what’s owed to me is on its way.
Um beijo do
Flamenguinho
Emma read the email with her computer facing the window and then facing away from it. She had thought it might keep Beatriz safe a little longer, her sin of omission at the hotel bar about how much money a new novel by Beatriz would generate in English. But perhaps that had been a mistake. If she hadn’t played along with Flamenguinho’s assumptions, maybe he wouldn’t have thought to start wagering with Marcus.
She felt a longing for her parents, for their reassurance, for the effortlessness of a conversation in her own language. If she called her parents now, though, they would just plead for her to come home. They would stop sleeping. They would send Miles to fetch her and contact the U.S. Embassy, which would lead to the Brazilian police, and Raquel would be furious. She was adamant that they were too corrupt to be of any help and would just sell the story about her mother’s gambling to the media.
But maybe Raquel would see things differently now, with this threat to Marcus.
Absolutely not. No police, Raquel said when Emma called and read her the email. They’ll make everything worse. Print out the email. Let’s meet at a café, and don’t cry or look scared when you leave your room, Raquel warned her. You need to look composed. In control.
Emma nodded, though she had no idea how she might compose herself until she remembered her new hat. She set it on her head, tilting the wide brim at a lighthearted angle, though she was shaking. By the time she reached the lobby, she was so terrified she had to sit down. She pulled out her notebook to steady herself with a little fantasy, to disappear for just a moment into the relief of make-believe—into the plea hidden in every fiction for immortality.
Raquel didn’t know what to make of Emma’s enormous new hat. They’d just sat down for coffee and, staring across at the odd dark feather in it, she wondered if her mother’s translator was losing her mind. Otherwise, why start wearing a giant hat now and make it even easier for someone to stalk her through Salvador?
Raquel had brought the pages she’d found on her mother’s computer, thinking that Emma might discover something in them that she couldn’t. But at the sight of that hat on Emma’s head, with its baffling inky-blue feather, Raquel now saw the idea as desperate and absurd. Emma was as susceptible to suppressing common sense as her mother was.
I think Rocha will do it, Emma was saying now. He’ll definitely loan the money. Why wouldn’t he?
Because he’s a snob, Raquel said. And online gambling isn’t an aristocratic pursuit. She shoved one of the chocolate brigadeiros she’d ordered into her mouth. Rocha probably just sent the money that one time because it was nothing to him. He was probably embarrassed for her.
Raquel looked away from the table, mortified at what she’d admitted, and to Emma, of all people. She had a vivid memory of Rocha coming by the apartment when her mother was in one of her slumps. Before he arrived, Raquel had picked up all the clothes from the floor and guided her mother into the shower and combed her hair. It had been like preparing a giant, glass-eyed doll. She’d yelled at her mother afterward. It had been such a relief to be angry at her again, for her mother to be recovered enough that Raquel could furiously demand an apology.
With all the bank statements and their hundreds of subtraction signs, she’d fantasized about pushing her mother’s face into the debt the way people did with their dogs, and saying to her, Look what you’ve done this time. Look.
Yet here, in Salvador, Raquel’s capacity for anger seemed to be depleted. She couldn’t cry in front of her mother’s translator. If she did, Emma would take over everything.
You printed out the email, right? Can I see it, please?
Emma passed it across the table and asked Raquel if she’d read the news about the writer who’d disappeared into a tree in the Jardim de Alá.
I know the girl he raped, Raquel said. She’s the daughter of a congressman. Of all the asshole writers to follow my mother’s lead.
But no one will see it that way. Emma shook her head, making her ridiculous feather quiver in her hat. Tourinho’s not in your mother’s league. His work is derivative and predictable. He’s exactly the kind of writer who would climb into a tree to imitate someone who is the real thing. The real thing, Raquel, Emma repeated, her eyes gleaming, as if that were all this was about: whose words dazzled more.
Emma, Raquel said slowly, you do realize there is a very good chance you could die here, and wearing a giant hat like that only makes it easier for someone to follow you. They’ll cut off your ears and send them to me or to your husband and think nothing of it.
Emma lowered her eyes. Please stop saying that. I’m not married. I was living with a boyfriend, but I’m here now and I’m not going to leave until we find your mother.
Raquel pinched open the clasp on her purse. I’ll show you something, she said, but you have to promise not to do anything with it without my permission.
Permission: From the Latin for yielding. 1. Formal consent, as in: A translator must acquire permission to publish a story consisting of words that are not her own but that also incidentally are. See also: paradox. 2. Authorization, as in: If an author vanishes, her translator must receive written permission from the executor of the author’s estate or her nearest of kin. 3. The act of permitting, often confused with the more tacit and confusing acquiescence, as in: The nearest of kin, out of financial distress, may acquiesce and use the word “permission” but later regret it, or outright deny such a conversation ever happened. See also: quandary.
Emma woke up thinking about her author’s body. At first, it was just that Beatriz had one, a body as female and vulnerable as her own. Yet in the shower, Emma could not help imagining the details until she had fathomed them all, her author fully undressed at thirty-four, the age she herself was now. She imagined Beatriz looking down as she scrubbed her arms, considering her breasts and the ribs visible beneath her skin, remembering who had touched her and where, the men all over Rio who had turned to observe her and her green eyes and had no idea what she would go on to write. Who wouldn’t have cared if they had known.
In the nearly ten years that Emma had spent translating Beatriz, it had never occurred to her to consider whether her author’s body possessed as many complicated secrets as her fiction did. But why wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it have to?
On her first read through the pages from Raquel, Emma kept skipping ahead. The shadow figure lurking in the alley behind the cinema felt so uncharacteristically contrived, a device out of a Sue Grafton murder mystery—S Is for Shadow. She kept waiting for Beatriz to subvert the cliché.
Yet every retelling led to the same stock image of a shadow and stopped. In the other scene, in Salvador, Beatriz kept losing traction, too. As Emma read on, she began to squirm. Any of the father’s averted-disaster tales could’ve veered into the stranger, more fantastical territory that Beatriz was known for, but none of them did. She’d never read anything from Beatriz so relentlessly flat and void of magic.
Unless, perhaps, the relentlessness was the point. Still, by the tenth iteration, Emma felt so exasperated with the alley scene that she had to put the pages down. When Raquel had been hesitant to hand her the man
uscript, Emma had assumed it had to do with how little Raquel trusted or even tolerated her. But surely Raquel’s hesitation had come as much, if not more, from a mistrust of the pages themselves and what they possibly revealed.
If the scenes were from Beatriz’s own life, Emma wondered what had happened first. If it was the writing about those minutes in the alley that had sent her author impulsively clicking her way into hundreds of thousands of dollars in poker debt. Or if the poker problem had happened first, and, unable to focus on her writing, Beatriz had gone back to her early journals to revisit what they contained.
Or maybe it had been more complicated. Maybe what had unmoored Beatriz was not just revisiting that alley in her mind but her incapacity to move beyond the facts of the scene for the sake of story, to take the sort of imaginative, magical leaps that people—Emma included—had come to expect. She stiffened at the thought of all the adoring emails she’d sent Beatriz over the past year, how much she’d gushed about her eagerness to get lost in the wonderful strangeness of Beatriz’s new book when it was finished.
In her classes at Pitt, Emma had often spoken of her friendship with her author, how well they’d come to know each other. On her trips to Rio, she’d told Beatriz more about her boredom with Miles than she had any of her friends in Pittsburgh. Although perhaps those confidences had as much to do with being a visitor in Portuguese as it did with Beatriz. It had been so much easier to say that there was something deadening about running alongside Miles when she was speaking in another language and with a lilt and leaving in seven days. In response to this confidence, Beatriz had brought up a poem by Hilda Hilst, a wonderful line about a woman unwilling to keep to the room where her lover wanted her to remain. The line had tendered as much understanding, or more, as any reciprocal confession.
Or no, maybe it hadn’t happened that way. Recalling the conversation now, Emma wasn’t sure if it had been Beatriz who’d brought up the Hilst poem, or if she herself had, and Beatriz had just gone on sitting there, listening.
Emma pushed aside her author’s unfinished manuscript and pressed open her notebook against the bed. A jolt of words came to her, as if she’d just touched an electric fence, the sentences coming too fast to second-guess them. On the stand, the hazy specter of every translator ever put on trial rose and requested a mirror. For wasn’t it time for the eternal translator to be provided with an aid in the defense of her alleged crimes? At this late point in human history, didn’t anyone being tried for literary offenses have a right, even an obligation, to show the spectators in the gallery their own reflections as they watched her and what power their expressions had over her own?
THUMP THUMP!
THUMP THUMP THUMP!
Emma jumped up from where she’d been hunched over her notebook. She’d been so focused that she’d forgotten where she was. The person at the door banged again, rattling the frame of the watercolor beach scene hanging above the bed. They had come for her. She was going to die here. Raquel had been right.
Emma had made it a habit to fasten the chain lock on the door every time she returned to her hotel room, but maybe it wouldn’t matter. She’d seen hit men in movies tear the chain lock off its track as if it were no more than a string of cheap pearls around a woman’s neck. If she didn’t answer her phone or her email, she wondered if it would occur to Raquel or Marcus to call the U.S. Embassy. If they would know how to reach her parents. She thought of her mother, asleep on the plaid sofa, getting such a call but it was too awful. Impossible.
Hey, it’s Marcus, the thumper said. Open up.
Emma didn’t reply. It sounded like Marcus, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be someone else, a hit man with a talent for imitation. She reached for her laptop and clicked on the last message from Miles. He checked his email incessantly in the evenings.
THUMP! THUMP!
Emma, você está ai?
How do I know you’re really Marcus? she called through the door as she typed.
Because I brought your wet sneakers into your room so you’d have sex with me.
And how long did I let you stay?
Not long enough, the voice on the other side answered. You were writing.
She unlatched the lock. The harsh fluorescent lighting of hotel hallways usually robbed a face of its beauty, but not Marcus’s. Not his high cheekbones and full mouth or his radioactive-green eyes. Emma pulled the door shut and he ran his hands over the goose bumps on her arms, over her breasts and down her ribs.
She didn’t ask if he’d called Raquel or if he knew that he might be kidnapped and lose an ear at any moment. What would it help if he knew now? He’d just arrived and they’d locked the door. She’d spent her life desperate to measure exactly how much she knew, and what had it gotten her?
A PhD.
An adjunct teaching job that came with a rusted metal desk she had to share with two other adjuncts, one of whom lived on Doritos and left neon-orange fingerprints on her Post-its.
A boyfriend who spent his evenings charting how his pulse rose during his morning run.
Outside the window of Emma’s hotel room, the Bahian moon was blue tinged and full over the ocean. Somebody on the street kept shouting, Maria, por favor! Come back here. Farther off, a car backfired, or it was a bullet shooting starlike through the dark. In her room, the thermostat glowed the temperature in Celsius. A balmy 31 degrees.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: if you don’t hear from me tomorrow
Emma, your email was incoherent. Whose ear are you talking about? You need to get up RIGHT NOW and take a cab to the American embassy. The address is at brazil.usembassy.gov. I can’t get to Salvador until 9:23 tomorrow night.
Did you click on the link yet? brazil.usembassy.gov. GO NOW. This writer, her children—they are strangers. What you’re doing down there is not your life.
For breakfast, they ordered omelets and slices of guava. When room service knocked, Marcus wrapped a towel around his waist and sauntered to the door with the ease of someone who was not unaccustomed to receiving his breakfast in this manner.
When she woke earlier, Emma had given in to the impulse to check her email while Marcus slept on beside her. She’d tried for a few minutes to just lie there, half-dozing, listening to the rattle of vendors’ carts assembling along the beach. She was sorry she hadn’t tried a little longer. Having seen her email, there was no postponing her dread of reckoning with Miles.
Unless she was willing to be cruel and switch hotels.
Divino! Marcus exclaimed over the toast, wiping some crumbs from his mouth. He reached down into his backpack lying open beside the bed and Emma assumed he was reaching for another condom, but he pulled out the new edition of Have You Tasted the Butterflies.
Did you see this at the airport? I’ve never finished any of my mother’s books. He handed Emma the new edition. I knew her books were all in the apartment, but so was she. It never felt right to read her when I could hear her in the next room. Or maybe I wasn’t ready to know what she said in them. He shrugged. Or it was just laziness.
Emma touched the book’s sleek new cover, its austere fork and knife. Even her author’s work had become unfamiliar to her now.
I had no idea so much of it was about adultery, Marcus said.
Well, and also the dream lives of pigeons.
That part I couldn’t follow. He pulled the sheet up as if he’d gotten cold. Will you read it? he asked. From the part about the pigeons?
Still naked, her fingertips sticky with guava, Emma began to murmur the words for Marcus that his mother had written before he was born. At first, she spoke the words so softly that she could barely hear herself, and Marcus drew closer.
With each sentence, she sank further into the words and her voice began to rise. She’d lived with these descriptions for so long, had mulled over them as she drove through the snow and while she brushed her teeth.
And wasn’t the splendor of translation this very thing—to discover sentences
this beautiful and then have the chance to make someone else hear their beauty who had yet to hear it? To arrive, at least once, at a moment this intimate and singular, which would not be possible without these words arranged in this order on this page?
For I know something, she read, about the dream life of pigeons. I know their dreams are not unlike the floating thoughts of a woman who’s forgotten herself in a bath. A woman who’s willed herself into a slumber as the water streams, steaming, from the faucet over the full tub and onto the floor, slowly leaking into the room below.
I know that pigeons, in their dreams, are also not unlike the willed slumber of the woman’s husband, who is in someone else’s bed in another part of town. A husband who wants to believe his wife is sleeping soundly in their home, a home he maintains at a distance that is not unlike the distance a pigeon keeps from the meaning of its dreams. Meanings that can be occasionally gathered in the droppings a pigeon may release into the air, the meanings spattered across windshields and tabletops and sometimes on the bald, unsuspecting heads of men.
Ah, that’s my mother’s there. Marcus pressed his lips to Emma’s shoulder and she continued more slowly, more luxuriantly. She’d read an essay by Borges once in which he’d used the word “lujosamente” to describe the voice in Joseph Mardrus’s translation of A Thousand and One Nights.
It is Mardrus’s infidelity, Borges declared, Mardrus’s happy and creative infidelity that must matter to us.
