Ways to Disappear

by Idra Novey

While they stared, one of the women thought of a story the other’s mother had written. It was about a tribe in which no one looked each other in the eye, believing that such avoidance could ward off the arrival of jaguars.

saw this in each other’s eyes and looked

translation, this kind of dilemma was known as domestication. A translator could justify moving around the objects in a sentence if it made it easier for her audience to grasp what was going on. She could even change an object into something more familiar to the reader to avoid baffling him with something he wouldn’t understand. It often occurred with food—with a fruit, for example, that the reader wasn’t likely to recognize and therefore whose sweetness he could not imagine.

The problem with domesticating things this way, however, was the possible misplacement of truth. Emma had made a practice of keeping this dilemma out of mind, of trusting that she was experienced enough now to intuitively know what could be moved and what couldn’t—when the location of an object was, in fact, its meaning.

the eternal translator raising the mirror the court had finally placed in

Thanks to Thiago, this time would be different. If you have to use it, use it, he had told her. The bullets

aren’t traceable.

told him she had also come a long way, that she was sorry she had gone in a different direction.

could just persuade her to leave here, she would recognize that immediately.

What for? There are always more hit men in Brazil.

She didn’t think the title he’d chosen, After the Alley, was what her mother would have selected, but maybe it was better.

mother had read with that kind of abandon. Raquel had never been able to. She’d had too many reservations about giving herself over that way, risking that some book might obliterate her carefully constructed sense of who she was.

now everyone she’d ever met was going to know she wasn’t supposed to have happened.

Boipeba, the smallest of the Tinharé islands off the coast of Salvador.

and that

They had disagreed about that early story as well. He had thought Beatriz could get away with only so many tales of self-sabotage in one book, and Yolanda was an adolescent character.

so long, she’d willfully sought the in-between.

thought of herself as fated to live suspended, floating between two countries, in the vapor between languages. But too much vaporous freedom brought its own constraints. She now felt as confined by her floating state as other, more wholesome people were to the towns where they were born.

brightest, sight-obliterating Brazilian

my friends, the great circus of Brazilian justice goes

the ocean, Rocha did not stop to watch it. To

taken his free movement

granted. He

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.

week, João had been watching the heavy older woman with the trench coat.

Mario had said the widow was a Jew.

Beatriz had told

and he’d missed it. She’d said the island

was the right place to end and he’d read the sentence only...

insisted that he misunderstood, that language was what had to be restrained, not the woman she’d invented, not the water pushing over the edge, onto the floor.

Eliminated.

mother is dead. Please leave me alone.

man who knows how to be silent, Beatriz wrote in her third novel, is a man who knows how to begin. But begin what? For whom?

been anything left of her mother after the