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They would delight in exercise and recycling.
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.
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,
was the work of a broken person, somebody too bewildered by her own thoughts to punch in anything but nonsense.
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.
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.
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
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And now here was her brother, thrusting himself into their mother’s translator, knocking their mother’s beloved books to the floor.
was postmarked a year ago and from Rio.
Emma, vanishing like this is crazy.
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
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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.
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.
young novelist named Vicente Tourinho was last seen scaling a banyan tree in the lovely Jardim de Alá. What’s going on with our writers, Brazil? What’s sending them into our city parks and up into the trees?
If only she’d been born a man in Babylon when translators had been celebrated as the makers of new language.
only she’d been born a man in Babylon when translators had been celebrated as the makers of new language. Or during the Renaissance, when translation was briefly seen as a pursuit as visionary as writing.
These people in Brazil
are not your life.
despair of feeling useless central to the modern human condition? Wasn’t that what Don Quijote was
overestimated her grasp of Brazil.
her eyes bulged at the sudden blaze in her mouth. Everything had an infernal aspect in Salvador. The hot pepper, the heat. Her mouth in flames, she unfolded her map to see where she was. She hadn’t come here to go wandering after feathers. Unless she had.
Every old object could be a correlative to an injustice if one wanted to see the world
way.
It’s about her safety. If she wants to leave Brazil, I want her to know I can help her. She could get a residency in Iowa at the International Writing Program there, or I could get her a longer-term teaching
Americans ever want to do is
help.
Beatriz had written a curious story once about five brothers who had trouble remembering names, even each other’s.
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.
disappear for just a moment into the relief of make-believe—into the plea hidden in every fiction for immortality.
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.
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.
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.
idea so much of it was about adultery,
Well, and also the dream lives of pigeons.
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.
For months after, at the thought of that moment, she experienced what García Márquez described as poisonous lilies taking root in her entrails.
got to love this country, eh? Viva Brazil!
Several large men had entered, their movements so dark and swift it was as if a colony of bats had taken over the entrance. Something screeched. Somebody shouted. By the time Emma and Raquel rushed inside, all that was left of Marcus was a tall glass shipwrecked on the bar in a spill of caipirinha. On the floor, a scatter of ice and lemons.
familiar with her vignette “The Old Man and His Book,” Rocha
The man tried to pick off the fungus with his fingernails. He knew the sentences by heart, but he still opened the book for the pleasure of the letters, of seeing them form the words he already knew. Yet the more fungus he scraped off, the bluer his hands became. By the time someone from the village found the old man deceased in his bed, they couldn’t tell where the fungus on the pages ended and the old man’s blued hands began.
thought Para R. was for Raquel, Emma said, but the story is for you. For your hands.
beauty of the story
futility of it, the devastating
failure of the author’s attempts to recast a rape and its aftermath by simply changing the fabric of a dr...
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world made no exception for lovers. She had performed the sentence in English, had read it with a great sense of importance on a panel on Luso-Brazilian literature in Minneapolis and at a reading at the Barnes & Noble in Squirrel Hill. To get the sentence just right, she’d murmured it over and over, determined to re-create the spare beauty of its music,
the world did not stop for lovers, Beatriz had written, lovers had no obligation to stop for the world or for the rain, for the beginning of a war or for its end. And there was nothing to be done about the lovers in the room next to Emma’s now, the sound of their headboard banging against the wall while she sat here, trembling.
the first time since she arrived in Brazil, she felt a longing for Pittsburgh,
Obrigada. Emma thanked him, hearing the Yankee clang of her accent in a way she hadn’t heard it in years. She’d learned the language too late to ever get the r’s right. Every time she spoke it was unavoidable: she released a fleet of mistakes.
Two women who disliked each other huddled on the edge of a hotel bed like sisters. For some time, they had been hunched this way over the tiny screen of a phone, waiting for the alert of a new email to appear. While they stared, one of the women thought of a story the other’s mother had written.
