Ways to Disappear

by Idra Novey

Flamenguinho.

Senhora Neufeld aware, the man inquired, that her author had recently climbed into an almond tree with a suitcase and hadn’t been seen in the five days since then?

Miles had begun the nightly preparations for their early run tomorrow. She heard the thump of their sneakers as he placed them by the door, the clink of her keys as he positioned them beside her banana. To leave a person capable of such meticulous devotion was difficult. She clicked to the weather. Outside their rented, somewhat shabby house in Pittsburgh, it was snowing sideways. In Rio de Janeiro, it was 106 degrees.

mother had left Johannesburg when she was two. Her mother was about as South African as bossa nova.

Having never reduced the trips to anecdotes, she could recall them more intuitively as she worked on her translations. She’d remember a morning in Rio as no more than an orange glow over the ocean and use that light to illuminate the strange, dark boats of Beatriz’s images as she ferried them into English.

But there was a second warden in the story, too. A minor character who climbed a palm tree outside the walls to listen to the lizards and found the distance so freeing, sitting there elevated and unseen, away from the other wardens and their prisoners, that he never came down.

she took in the familiar stink of armpits, car exhaust, and guavas

real greats, he said, masters like Jorge Amado and Carlos Drummond.

Flamenguinho

Listen, he said to her breasts, fuck the story. You know what I want? I want the six hundred thousand fucking dollars she owes me. Okay? I know she’s broke. So you need to get the damn book from her.

Her sunscreen was a problem, too. During Emma’s visits, the living room would begin to reek of those American lotions with an excess of zinc.

Her mother had a whole clan of elderly aunts in São Paulo who wired her cash whenever she needed it, although the calls had their cost, too. They always ended with her mother hunched over and apologizing, saying, You’re right, you’re right, that’s what I should’ve done.

falling out of a tree

explained everything.

Beatriz had looked at her with confusion and said the novel Emma had just translated was all about them.

coming to Brazil in her author’s absence, she had put herself on trial.

might think she couldn’t handle the brutes running the strike up in Minas and he’d give the negotiations to Enrico.

When people asked what it was like to be the daughter of someone who came up with such peculiar stories, Raquel told them the truth. She’d never read her mother’s books. She had no patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels. What about knowing what a writer had never written down—wasn’t that the real knowledge of who she was?

nature of public transportation in Brazil, the ferry to Ilha Grande was running an hour late.

Flamenguinho,

often fatal.

With the works of fiction he selected for his press, he tested for density as well, for something tender in the middle yet still heavy enough to blacken the

air.

Caro Roberto, the letter began,

And then it came to him: the bubble bath scene in the opening pages of the novel that had put his press on the map. Luisa Flaks with her head back, her long wet hair spread out like a spider web against the porcelain of the tub. Sensual, ordinary Luisa reclining in the bath, or not quite ordinary, as she’d had the nerve to resist turning off the faucets, had let the water spill steadily over the edge of the tub and across the tiles and seep into the apartment below, had let the spill go on until her skin had shriveled at the center of her fingertips and her toes and she could no longer feel her backbone against the porcelain. Rocha had been concerned that the scene was too extreme, that the descriptions dragged on too long, but Beatriz had insisted that was the point: to push everything—the amount of water, the details. To take all of it too far.

Pittsburgh, Miles, her job—all of it felt like a skin she’d shed on the plane. Even English and who she was in it felt discardable, or at least until the long-haired boys at the prow began strumming the chords to “Redemption Song.”

Radio Globo

Why

her son was seen on a ferry off to holiday on Ilha Grande instead of looking for his mother in the trees of her fair city, we don’t know. But let’s wish him well, my friends. He is a son in strange waters, which seems as good a reason as any to fall in love.

the photograph, the rain and low gray sky over the ferry made her brother and Emma look like refugees fleeing a civil war, surviving a storm on passion

headline like South African Author Still Missing, Son Rests on Her Translator.

She’d seen enough women gaze at her brother’s face to know what would happen next. By tomorrow morning, the two of them would be searching for Emma’s underwear in the hotel sheets

most of the loss was under the name O Sapateiro, the Shoemaker—what

South Africa, he’d been a lawyer, but his limited

Portuguese had made that impossible in Brazil.

Like the napkins in all cheap Brazilian restaurants, they were plastic-based and made her feel like she was wiping her face with a garbage bag.

the courtroom ceiling above her translator’s hazy head there surely would be a hole. For two thousand years, when it rained anywhere in the world, it had rained over the translator. When it snowed, surely the jury would accuse the translator of hiding behind the snow.

He was going to offer up the idea as casually as suggesting a game of Boggle. But he only pointed to her open notebook on the bed. So you write, too, he said.

But what was that look on her face? Somebody who didn’t know better would say it was desire—what a man will deny himself until he can’t. Beatriz had written the line at the close of her story “Santiago Martins.” 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.

Santiago’s desire had to be imperative, to carry the weight of fact. At least in English.

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.

She wasn’t visible anymore, or not until she disappeared.

Once the Comando Vermelho kidnaps their next banker, the media will move on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.