by Idra Novey
No, now’s fine. I really need to eat. Raquel stood up and the two women silently changed places, Emma taking up the lone chair on the far side of the bed, away from the IV stand. Once Raquel had gone, she pressed her lips to Marcus’s fingers. His arm looked paler to her now, the veins more visible at the surface.
Minha tradutora, he murmured, and she told him how long she’d sat out in the waiting room, how much she’d wanted to go in the ambulance, but his sister…
I know. He closed his eyes. She was now close enough to see the scabs at the corners of his lips, the long row of stitches along the swollen flap that was the remaining gesture of his ear. She felt sick at the savagery of it and at the thought of her author knowing this had happened to her son. Or not knowing.
I’m going to find her for you, she said.
Please don’t, and Raquel shouldn’t either. We were naive, Marcus said with a tone that was the closest to bitter she’d ever heard from him. We should’ve gone into hiding like my mother did, or just left the country right away.
Emma felt her heart lurch. Would you leave now? she asked, but Marcus shrugged.
There’s no point, he said. They already ravaged me. I’m a man without an ear.
At the mention of the ear, he retracted his hand from under Emma’s and closed his eyes. Every consolation she could think of felt inadequate, so she said nothing. She wasn’t even sure where to look. Certainly not at his bandaged ear, and not at his neck, which was collared in awful, raw-looking blisters where the rope had held the bag tight around his skin.
And the book, Marcus said with his eyes still closed. Did you bring it with you?
I did. She reached for her bag. I didn’t know if you’d want to hear your mother’s—
I meant yours. What you’ve been writing.
Emma leaned into him as if they were on the ferry again with a damp wind against her back. When Marcus leaned to meet her mouth, something beeped on the machines. Must be the libido reader, Marcus said, but the beeping didn’t stop. It got faster and shriller. Marcus kissed her harder, and Emma shifted her weight to her wrists, bracing for whoever would enter to attend to the machines and find her there, leaning too far over the bed to pull away.
Another poor rapaz from Minas, my friends, is locked up for good. In record time, the police say they have the man who kidnapped Yagoda’s son. But the poor rapaz they picked up can’t write his own name. Here at Radio Globo, we’re wondering how he wrote the ransom notes. Would a loan shark with serious cash have a record of stealing gasoline?
And so, my friends, the great circus of Brazilian justice goes on.
The arrest played on the morning news while Raquel sat on her hotel bed. She was finishing off the soggy remains of a sandwich from the hospital cafeteria while she texted Thiago. If she did at least three tasks at once, she felt less conscious about eating so many meals this way, alone.
Do you think that man, she texted Thiago, could kidnap the rice and beans off his own plate?
She swallowed a bit more of her soggy sandwich and reread the message, regretting having sent it. Since the gun, Thiago had offered so little. He took hours to respond, and when he did, the only jokes he made were about giving her job to Enrico if she stayed away much longer—Enrico, who was so cocky and inept they’d spent entire meals making fun of him.
The police believe this arrest may lead to the return of beloved writer Beatriz Yagoda, the newscaster announced, brushing her bleached bangs out of her face, and Raquel clicked off the TV. She also kicked the remote to the floor, then her phone, which made for several desperate seconds of searching when it began to ring.
It was only Rocha, however. In his standard aloof voice, he reported that he’d received a letter from her mother postmarked from the remote island Boipeba. Her request, he said, is for you to go to her.
Raquel looked down at her filthy clothes on the floor, her tank tops wilted with sweat, her yellowed bras. The one well-cut linen dress she’d brought was now stained in two places, though she’d continued to wear it anyhow. She’d even begun reusing her underwear.
Rocha explained that the letter had been very brief, and Raquel nodded, not aware that she’d begun to cry until she wiped her face. And my mother thinks, she said, that she can just send a note through you and I’ll jump on the next ferry to Boipeba?
My dear, you are free to do with this information as you please.
Am I? I don’t feel particularly free. Raquel yanked open the desk drawer to get the notepad she’d seen there. What’s the name of her hotel?
Well, I had my assistant look into the matter and I think you might find her at Pousada do Sol. Your mother’s only remark was that she was lodging at the one with yellow umbrellas.
All she gave was the color of the umbrellas? Puta que o pariu! Raquel sank onto the bed. She knew this was just the sort of outburst that a man like Rocha would recoil from and she should calm down. He was their only savior.
And what am I supposed to do about my brother? she yelled anyway. Leave my mother’s translator in charge? Emma doesn’t understand anything about Brazilian hospitals.
The translator will be adequate, Rocha said. I really have to go, dear. Um beijo.
Alone again with the little that remained of her soggy hospital sandwich, Raquel turned to her phone to cope in the way of her generation. She tapped the screen and began to search for things.
There was a catamaran to Morro de São Paulo. Then she’d have to take a speedboat. There didn’t seem to be a direct route, but with her mother there never had been.
She scrolled down for the boat schedule but found only a single time: one chance a day at 10 a.m.
She had fifty-three minutes.
Chance: From the Latin cadentia, that which falls out. 1. A force assumed to cause events that can neither be foreseen nor controlled, as in: She could find her mother only by chance and a yellow umbrella. 2. A fleeting, favorable set of circumstances. See also: gamble, hazard.
The boat’s horn was sounding when she arrived, the motor already chopping at the water. Raquel called down the dock for the ticket man to wait, the wheels of her suitcase stuttering over the planks. He gestured for her to take her time, that she was fine, but once she started to run she couldn’t stop. She was still panting as he lifted her luggage onto the boat and told her to relax. She wasn’t the last one. A man had gotten out of a taxi just behind hers.
Pulled up right after you, the ticket man said.
And he’s coming down the dock now? Raquel felt her throat closing. He’s followed me, she said. I’ll give you forty reais if you lift the plank now. Please. She reached for his thin, veiny arm. He was an old man, his eyebrows white and bushy, the skin folding in around his mouth. My ex-boyfriend is terribly violent, she said, scraping around in her wallet for cash.
She held out sixty reais and he said, Está bom, menina, already lifting the ramp.
As they pulled away, she didn’t let herself look. With a face, he would only haunt her longer. She thought of her mother’s pages and wondered if her mother had been able to keep her eyes shut. Alongside the catamaran, the blunt edge of the dock was behind them.
They were onto the water now and on their way.
Although he lived in front of the ocean, Rocha did not stop to watch it. To do so had come to feel like a cliché. Yet this morning, he could not resist. And so ten steps behind him the temporary bodyguard he’d hired for himself and Alessandro stopped as well. To be followed all day in this manner was exasperating, but until the services he’d paid for were completed, he had no choice. He had taken his free movement for granted.
He had also forgotten this splendid breeze, how one couldn’t feel it without coming to a stop completely, although it was not really the ocean that he was considering now so much as Raquel moving across it, how long it would take her to reach Boipeba. He found her a rather tiresome young woman, but imagining her alone on some boat full of tourists, he felt an ache for her.
Even if she
did find her mother, the conversation, or lack of it, would be excruciating. Beatriz would fix her gaze on some gloomy incongruity on the beach—a plastic spoon jutting out of the sand, the hand of a broken doll, some dying bird. Raquel would see her mother looking away and would want more, much more, and who could blame her? Didn’t he want more from Beatriz? Didn’t everyone?
Miles remained. Emma hadn’t had the nerve to kick him out of her room but she hadn’t ceded either. The only meal they ate together was breakfast. After that, she left for the hospital and Miles swam endless laps in the hotel pool or took runs when it was still hot enough to sear the skin on his forehead and the tips of his large ears. When Emma brought up the benefits of a hat to him at breakfast, how she’d resisted the idea as well, Miles turned away to scowl at their waiter. He said he could see the man in the doorway doing nothing but staring out at the ocean. This must be why you feel so at home here, he said. Nobody seems to care who might be waiting for them.
Emma responded with a tense smile. It seemed as awkward a time as any to let him know that Marcus was going to be released soon from the hospital. At the news, Miles began chopping at various invisible objects on the table with his butter knife. You can’t go on pretending this is your life, he said.
It’s been my life for years.
Chop, chop, chop went his knife against the table. A child came by selling flowers made of lacquered shells, and then their waiter crept up to say there would be no espresso today, unfortunately. Something was wrong with the machine. Could he offer them some tea?
The water around the island of Boipeba hid nothing. As the catamaran slowed and docked, Raquel could see clear to the bottom, all the broken shells spiraling in the wake of the boat, even the tiny fish glinting among the reeds. Up on the bank, everything was a blur of tourism. She tried to focus on the hotels and their umbrellas but was distracted by all the donkeys and foreigners, the islanders hustling back and forth, trying to make a buck.
Senhora, a bagagem! a man loading up one of the donkeys shouted, pointing at the waste his animal had just left and through which she’d just wheeled her luggage.
All week, João had been watching the heavy older woman with the trench coat. It hadn’t rained a single day on Boipeba but the woman kept the coat with her at all times, like a purse or a pet. When she first walked into the hotel, he’d assumed with her pale skin and light eyes that she must be a foreigner. But she spoke perfect Carioca Portuguese and didn’t ask about air-conditioning or Wi-Fi or any of the things the foreigners wanted to know. She’d just asked for the weekly rate, lit a long Dannemann cigar as if it was the most obvious thing for a heavyset older woman holding a trench coat to do on a remote island, and followed him so quietly to the room that he wouldn’t have known she was still behind him if it wasn’t for the leafy aroma of her lit cigar.
Every day since then, she had smoked through the afternoons. She’d pick a spot out under the umbrellas or at one of the shaded wooden tables under the palms. Ana, who made up the rooms in the mornings, was the one who first started calling her the Widow Yolanda and said the cigars must have belonged to her husband. João had never seen a woman smoke a cigar in public like that, but then his mother had done strange things after the fishing boat came back without his father. There had been the baths in the middle of the night and, as with the Widow Yolanda, hours when all his mother could do was stare at the trash can or a crack in the wall as if it were as hypnotizing as the waves.
Mario, the owner, who had been to Rio many times, said he could tell that the widow had been a looker once. He said it was a shame she’d let herself get so round and morose. He said Cariocas were known for staying sexy into their fifties, and with her green eyes and reddish-gray hair, Yolanda would have found a second husband, no problem, if she’d kept herself together.
On the island, however, the Widow Yolanda was most definitely falling apart. Every morning she looked more broken. Her second day on the island she left her lunch uneaten. Her third day she sat on her glasses and cracked one of the lenses. She’d asked João for some tape to hold the frames together enough to wear, though she admitted that she could barely see through the lenses now at all.
When a young woman walked in during breakfast on Friday morning and said Mamãe and ran to the widow, all the guests eating at the other tables turned to watch.
At the daughter’s touch, a twitch rippled through the widow as if she were a just-slit eel. João knew he should look away but he couldn’t. No one did. The daughter touched her mother’s crooked glasses and the filthy trench coat and started sobbing. Next to the daughter, who was not beautiful, he saw what Mario had been talking about. It wasn’t just that the daughter didn’t have her mother’s green eyes or long, slender, foreign-looking nose. When the widow moved, it felt historic. It was like watching an aging leopard slink through a forest. They’d all been mesmerized, trying to imagine how effortlessly she must have hunted once.
And then the Widow Yolanda abruptly let her daughter go and stepped backward—leaving her daughter’s arms out in the air around nothing, in front of everyone. The daughter turned her face as if she’d been struck, and João turned away as well, ashamed for her. There was also, suddenly, a strong smell of fresh dung.
When he looked back, the daughter was stepping out of the breakfast area, the widow behind her. The rest of the day the two of them kept their distance from the hotel. He saw them once on the beach, the widow puffing on one of her long Dannemann cigars, the sleeves of her coat rolled up over her freckled wrists, and the daughter talking, always talking. The next two mornings at breakfast they sat at the farthest table. João couldn’t hear what they were saying, though it was the daughter who kept gesturing, squeezing her hands into fists. The Widow Yolanda remained still as a leopard, smoking, listening.
That afternoon, as abruptly as the daughter had appeared, she wheeled her luggage back down to the dock. The widow followed slowly behind her, holding nothing but the coat. They hadn’t handed in the key or paid for the last two nights. João knew it was his job to run after a guest in such a situation. It was so awkward. He hated it and couldn’t bring himself to do it now, not to the widow and her homely daughter. If Mario gave him a hard time he could just say he didn’t see them leave, that they had been sneaky. Mario had said the widow was a Jew.
But Yolanda didn’t go. When the boat left, only the daughter was on it. The widow stayed on the dock, watching, the donkeys moving slowly around her. She was still there after the arriving passengers had gone and after the boatmen had left for lunch, the sun beating down on her round, sad shape, and João wondered if he should guide her into the shade, if someone should, but no one did. She wasn’t that kind of woman.
To stand on a dock among packs of donkeys and watch your daughter float across the water, away from you.
To watch her through broken, splintered glasses.
To have stayed awake for two nights watching your grown child sleep, a child who you’d forced too early to be an adult and who’d grown thick from it the way a vine will.
To study the woman this child has become as she sleeps heavily next to you.
To drink her in and in, like a stew for which there is no spoon.
To see enough through the fractured glass in your lens to know even in her sleep she is uneasy with you now, abhors the heavy coat you found on a bench which is hideous but you can’t let go of it for its pockets.
To fill those wonderful pockets with all the German cigars in Brazil.
To smoke them all.
To work up the nerve slowly,
smoking,
to say it.
To tell your daughter about the blood that ran down your legs and stained your sandals in a restaurant bathroom just after you married her father.
To leave out for your daughter the brief interval of time between the bleeding in the restaurant you called a miscarriage and when you felt pregnant again, to tell her you wrote the sequence the way you did for the sake of stor
y.
To speak of this bleeding to her and then retreat into adages about craft and beauty.
To make no mention of the truth about the interval, that it had been less than a day and the doctor said it was the same pregnancy, that it had been spotting, not a miscarriage, because you were certain he was wrong—it was another baby now and you had chosen the father.
To hold on to this certainty the way one holds on to a coat or a word.
To have made a coat of words and cloaked yourself in it.
To have lifted yourself into an almond tree.
To have climbed higher and higher as you had as a child and recall the same breeze carrying the same scent of almonds, and before you could fall there was your father below, waiting to catch you.
To endure the fact that you were on an island, doing nothing but smoking, while one of your children’s ears was delivered to a hotel in a box.
To know the self-loathing that is having brought harm to your son, to both of your children, to have nothing to hide in from this loathing but the dirty coat again.
To hear your daughter say it has the odor of a stranger.
To be this stranger she speaks of.
To find that being a stranger to her all day is like having a fever, your skin burning with it, and meanwhile your daughter seething, unable to bear you.
To watch her leave on a boat through glasses you sat on and which you can’t fix in this place where you’ve heard them call you Widow.
To glimpse now, as she goes, just enough splinters of your daughter through these broken glasses to know.
