by Idra Novey
And matter LUXURIANTLY, she had added in the margin. Miles had been sitting next to her when she was reading the essay and made fun of her for putting the word in all caps like an adolescent girl. That same weekend Elsewhere Press had approached her about translating a second book by Beatriz. When she told Miles that she’d agreed to the project, he’d pursed his lips as if he’d just noticed the green crusted residue of a pea soup in the corners of her mouth.
For months after, at the thought of that moment, she experienced what García Márquez described as poisonous lilies taking root in her entrails.
On top of her now, Marcus ran his tongue along her collarbone. Segue, tradutora, he said. Continue.
And so she continued all morning, LUXURIANTLY, until page seventy-six, when the entire building filled with bathwater and pinkish suds spilled over the windowsills and her voice began to crack and her wrists began to wilt from holding up the book and the phone began to ring and ring and she knew it was Raquel and that her author would want her to answer. There was also the matter of Miles closing in.
The news here at Radio Globo, my friends, is gruesome. We’ve just heard that the second of our writers to disappear into the trees of Rio was found castrated and dead in his car this morning. Vicente Tourinho, a mere twenty-six years old.
Here at Radio Globo, we shudder for Tourinho. All you other authors out there in Rio, please, please stay out of the trees!
Raquel no longer felt safe anywhere. In her hotel room, she couldn’t shower without checking for intruders in the empty cabinets under the sinks. She couldn’t fall asleep without testing the bolt on the door. And she couldn’t remain asleep either. Every few hours, she would wake and tense and have to check for men in the bathroom cabinets again.
Sitting in the shady café garden where she’d told Marcus and Emma to meet her, she felt tired enough to fall asleep at the table. The description of the café online had said that the garden was quiet and secluded, which seemed true enough. Fat-bottomed palm trees framed the perimeter, the pinnate leaves of the taller ones creating a partial roof overhead.
But were a few squatting palms really going to protect them? She was still sitting here alone. Her mother still owed half a million dollars to a psychopath. When her phone rang and she saw that it was Thiago, she was so grateful she began to cry.
Bom dia, fugitive! What’s that noise—you’re not getting weepy, are you?
Of course not. I’m not a crier. She pressed her hand over her nose to stifle the sound.
You are a menacing machine, mulher! he shouted at her from Rio. This place is a shit show without you. When are you coming back?
I don’t know. The loan shark just threatened to kidnap my brother.
You got to love this country, eh? Viva Brazil! Thiago whistled a little samba into the phone. But seriously, woman, you come from Jews—don’t your people always have some money in the mattress for crap like this? You’re going to prevail, Raquel, you always do. Gotta run. That ass pimple Enrico’s calling.
And he was gone.
That was it, all she’d get of him from here.
Before she could wallow or recover, Emma and Marcus came through the door of the café into the back garden. Her brother bent to kiss her first and she didn’t bother to berate him for coming to Salvador without telling her or for going straight to Emma’s bed. He was like their mother. With their green eyes and quiet, reptilian ways, they did things exactly as they pleased. Watching him sit down across from her, she thought of all the things Marcus had not been, and would never be.
Not the offspring of a shadow.
Not terrified to ask their mother about that shadow and equally terrified that he might never have a chance to ask her.
And Marcus, tall, slinky, jewel-eyed Marcus, was not waking every morning alone.
He was not obliged to stare across this table at their mother’s translator, so sated and aglow she might as well have hung a sign around her neck that said I JUST HAD SEX WITH YOUR BROTHER. IT WAS SUBLIME.
While her author’s children argued, Emma kept her head lowered and tried her best to be present yet invisible. The table that the waitress had given them was wobbly, the legs tipping back and forth every time Marcus or Raquel put their hands on it. Even a week ago, Emma would have quietly tried to steady it for them to stop the banging, but she didn’t now. Marcus was adamant that they call their relatives in São Paulo, but Raquel said they wouldn’t give that kind of money. She said their mother hadn’t been in touch with them for so long. Marcus tilted the table and said the alternative was to give Flamenguinho’s messages to the media and see if the coverage scared him into backing down, but Raquel told Marcus he was naive. She said the media made a soap opera of kidnappings all the time and it changed nothing. The news in Brazil, she said, was run by a bunch of union-loving idiots. Marcus asked her not to launch into one of her tirades and she told him to go to hell.
In the tense silence that followed, Emma kept her eyes down and her hands on her lap. She couldn’t think of anything to offer and knew they were not going to ask anything of her either, which left her free to panic about Miles landing in Bahia in nine hours. From there, he’d make his way to her hotel and then to her room. These were facts she had yet to relay in Portuguese to her author’s son.
She heard Marcus push back his chair. Anyone else want a caipirinha? Emma wasn’t sure she could stomach alcohol this early in the day but she nodded yes. In Marcus’s absence, she became more acutely aware of Raquel’s foot or knee, something of hers, tapping frantically against the table leg.
When the breeze sent Emma’s napkin sliding toward the edge, Raquel pinned it to the table like a bug. You should’ve called me the second he arrived, she said. He’s my brother.
But it was two in the morning. It was so late.
Did you show him my mother’s pages?
I told him about them, but I—
Give me the manuscript.
Raquel snatched it from Emma’s hand before she could place it on the table. Let’s make something clear, okay? If my mother never surfaces, you can find someone else to cheat on your husband with and some other book to translate. This is my family.
Emma opened her mouth to say that she wasn’t married, that she would be devoted to Beatriz’s work for the rest of her life, when something happened inside the café. 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.
Rocha summoned a waiter to remove his caipirinha from the table. The lemon rinds were caked with dirt. Outrageous. Didn’t the Aram Yamí wash its fruit properly before serving it? Did they have no standards of basic hygiene?
I’m so sorry, sir, the waiter said.
Rocha turned his face away, disgusted, until the offending glass had disappeared. In these few hours left in Salvador before his flight back to Rio, he’d felt increasingly furious with himself. Only a floundering, desperate man would travel all this way to find a writer he hadn’t published in twenty years. He’d never been able to cajole Beatriz into doing anything she didn’t want to do. No one could. She’d only written to him now for his money. He had no reason to believe she’d give him a manuscript just because he’d paid for her hotels, or that she even had a finished manuscript to give to anyone.
He’d been correct to schedule a flight for this very afternoon. Until then, perhaps he’d take a walk down the street for a box of mints. He needed to do something that bordered on exercise so he wouldn’t have to lie to Alessandro when he returned.
In the lobby of the Aram Yamí, he stopped at the reception desk to ask, just one more time, if anyone had stopped by.
Sim, Senhor Roberto, the receptionist said. Two women came by about half an hou
r ago and asked for you to call them at this number as soon as possible.
The receptionist handed over an envelope with the Aram Yamí’s ornate logo on it and a folded-up Post-it inside, with nothing on it but numbers. At last. They’d found Beatriz.
A rubbery feeling filled Emma’s head as she reentered the Aram Yamí. At the reception desk, she had trouble recalling Rocha’s first name and then stuttered as she said her own. Beside her, Raquel was weeping and making frantic calls on her cell. In the elevator, Raquel’s phone stopped getting reception, and she clutched Emma’s arm like a blind person.
They could be hacking off my brother’s ear right now, Raquel said. He could be bleeding to death as we’re standing here in this elevator. Maybe they’ll leave him in the trunk of a car until he suffocates from the heat.
That’s not going to happen, Emma assured her, as if they were speaking about a book she’d been teaching for years. As if there weren’t anyone as reliable in a kidnapping as a devoted translator.
The elevator dinged.
Its single wooden panel slid open.
In the blue, carpeted quiet leading to Rocha’s room, Emma thought of her own hotel room, of Marcus’s clothes waiting for her, draped over the chair and on the desk, of his toothbrush beside the sink, his mother’s novel still face down on the page where they had stopped reading it this morning. Of Miles arriving, impossibly, in five and a half hours.
Emma, keep going. It’s not that door.
I just need a second.
But Rocha had heard them and stepped out into the hall. It’s fine, take a second, he said. Nothing wrong with a little hesitation before hitting up a man for his fortune.
Hesitation: From the Latin haerere, to adhere or cling. A delay due to uncertainty of mind, as in: The translator didn’t hesitate before taking on her author’s next novel, or before declaring her life’s work was to further the recognition of said author, an identity she adhered to until, in a certain hallway, she hesitated.
Rocha’s room was immaculate. He hadn’t left a single garment in view, no voluminous pajamas on the bed, not a single sock, not even a pair of shoes on the floor. Besides the bed, the only places to sit down were two stiff, paisley-printed armchairs. Rocha sank into one and Raquel the other. Raquel had been the one to insist that they meet here, in Rocha’s room, to be sure no one could eavesdrop. With both chairs occupied, Emma was left hovering slightly to the side of the conversation. It was not an unfamiliar position or one without benefits. Present but unacknowledged, she was under no pressure to speak. This didn’t mean she couldn’t, however. Or that, timed right, her influence couldn’t prove significant, even pivotal.
Raquel, dear, Rocha was saying, if I give you the ransom money, these hyenas will know you’ve found a source of significant cash. They’ll just keep feasting on you for more.
But we’ll pay you back eventually. All I’m asking for is a loan. They have my brother, for God’s sake. Puta que o pariu! Raquel swore, and let out such a primal, sorrowful sound that Emma saw something give in Rocha’s face, and she thought, Now.
What if instead of a loan, she spoke up, it was a trade? If in exchange for the ransom we could offer you, Roberto, a new manuscript by Beatriz?
At the word “manuscript,” both Raquel and Rocha sat up in their chairs as if a tremor had passed through the room.
I thought she was getting nowhere with the new book, he said.
She has over two hundred pages.
But they’re private still, Raquel said. They’re just a jumble of scenes. She shot a violent glare at Emma, but Rocha had already turned his rotund body as much as the armchair would allow.
And the manuscript is here, in Salvador? he asked.
It’s here in this room, Emma said. If you write the check, you can have it now.
No, he can’t, Raquel said, but Emma ignored her. Rocha’s face had taken on a hot glow, his eyes flaming in his round face like a pair of candles inside a carved pumpkin.
Obviously, something has to be done for poor Marcus, Rocha said, but seventy-five thousand dollars—
We can take it to Alfaguara or another publisher if you’re not interested, Emma said. Raquel let out a huff in the other armchair, but she was the present but unacknowledged one now.
How about fifty? Rocha wagered.
Eighty, Emma said. With all the media attention, the book will sell out immediately.
Rocha sat back in his chair and Emma felt the chips sliding in her direction. She willed her face to stay impassive, willed her thoughts not to return to Marcus happening upon her thigh in the taxi, of him straddling her in bed.
You must be familiar with her vignette “The Old Man and His Book,” Rocha said.
I translated it in one night, Emma said. It was a short piece, no more than a few hundred words. An old man got into bed with the only book he’d ever owned and found that a blue fungus had begun to bloom over the words. 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.
I thought Para R. was for Raquel, Emma said, but the story is for you. For your hands.
Rocha reached for the briefcase beside the claw-footed leg of his chair, and Emma realized she was holding her breath.
Oh, yes, he was still breathing. He was still alive. No one was going to seal the coffin on Roberto Rocha and Editora Eco just yet. On the plane, he made so many notes and edits on Beatriz’s manuscript that both of his pens ran out of ink and he had to ask the stewardess for another and work with the poorest quality writing utensil imaginable.
The first drafts he’d seen from Beatriz thirty years ago had been just like this, with each burst of brilliance buried in pages and pages of excess and repetitions. The translator had been shrewd to bargain the way she had, but Rocha didn’t feel swindled. He’d worked with Beatriz on enough stories to know that something sublime was buried here. It was just a question of streamlining. By the time his plane began its descent toward Galeão International Airport, he’d figured it out: the story was in the changes. All he had to do was winnow out everything but the details that altered in each telling. The beauty of the story was the 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 dress or the entrée on the table.
With Beatriz missing, the critics were going to speculate until they got light-headed about whether the scene at Cine Paissandu was autobiographical. Alessandro was going to be horrified at how much he’d paid for the manuscript, but what was money for if not to halt the mutilation of some boy’s face and his possible death? What was the point of being an editor if he didn’t have a manuscript like this one in front of him, if his days contained nothing but enervating sentences that risked nothing, asked nothing, did nothing but require ink in a book that generated no real emotion, no genuine unease, not even from the editor who published it?
Rocha shook out the last greasy cashew from his in-flight snack mix and crumpled up the bag like so much fiction. With his other hand, he set the milk in his coffee awhirl.
The world, according to Beatriz, made no exceptions for lovers. A flood was just as likely to carry away two devoted lovers in a bed as it was a house filled with cobwebs. A dengue-infected mosquito was just as likely to bite the back of a man kissing his wife as the knee of a politician while he hid the city’s coffers in his armoire.
And the world had made no exception for Marcus. Emma had slept with him, read his mother’s work to him while he lay so close to her she could hear his heart. None of it had kept him safe. They’d wired Rocha’s money to Flamenguinho immediately, but when she returned to her hotel at four, there was a shoe box inside a plast
ic bag waiting for her at the reception desk. It was an orange shoe box with the Nike logo on top. Inside, someone had placed a note and a sandwich-size plastic bag. Within the bag was a blood-crusted ear she had licked so recently she could still half taste it on her tongue.
The 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, its somber tone.
Yet recalling the passage now, she felt numb to its beauty. All that registered was its desolation. She felt it with everything in her that could ache and break down. Because 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.
Even mutilated, the shriveled-up flesh of Marcus’s ear looked particular, clearly belonging to a singular human form, just as the handwritten note was inexorably human in the inconsistent curves of its letters and the lunacy of its lines:
YOUR LOVER BOY CRIES LIKE
A GIRL.
YOU’RE GOOD FOR
FORTY MORE, TRANSLATOR.
SEND IT BY MIDNIGHT
OR I’LL SEND YOU A CHUNK
OF THE OTHER EAR.
SEND THE MONEY NOW
AND YOU GET YOUR
LOVER BOY
TOMORROW.
Emma translated the note several times, as if there were a chance that if she went over it again she might be able to come up with a less horrifying version, or could modify it so that it would suggest something slightly different, that Marcus was not tied up somewhere crying in pain or already unconscious by now. They must have put something on his head to bandage the wound. If they let him bleed to death or get an infection, there would be no money. She was fairly sure that was how kidnappings worked.