by Idra Novey
To wager that her boat has become a hyphen against the water, a comma, and then
By the time Rocha clicked to the right channel he’d missed the last of the flames. All the cameras were showing now was the ash, blowing in gusts like swarms of locusts, or like something more minuscule that couldn’t be captured on TV—clusters of atoms or electrons, the spectral bits of a mind too extraordinary to leave the world in the ordinary way of simply getting old and waiting for disease.
Then, at last, the camera zoomed out and he saw the hotel sign and the yellow umbrellas, how much of the back half of the building had been blackened into a cavity of ashes. A young man from the island who worked at the reception desk was speaking into a microphone, but Rocha put him on mute. He couldn’t stand to hear the analysis of some bellhop in flip-flops. He’d already heard the island people going on about her odd cigars, how the fire had surely been an accident. But Beatriz had told him and he’d missed it. She’d said the island was the right place to end and he’d read the sentence only as it pertained to him and the book of hers he’d published, as her gracious way of letting him know she was not appalled by what he had done with her pages. He’d read the note only for what it said about his skill, his worth to her as an editor.
Even now, watching the brigade of shirtless men from the island splashing buckets of water at the room in which she’d caught on fire, Rocha could not think of her actual body. Only of her sentences, of Luisa Flaks in the bathtub letting the suds and water flow over the edge and on and on, of how Beatriz had 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.
And now even the ash was unclear. A speck of soot or sand had gotten stuck on the camera lens, or a smear of water.
Goddamn it, fix it! Rocha shouted at the TV like an old man. But the smudge remained.
Eliminated. That was the word the service had used when they called to let him know that the loan shark was finally gone. They had found him. Rocha’s sister had insisted that he hire two services, as one was sure to be incompetent. To pay multiple criminals to find and kill someone on his behalf, to condone a murder, to write a check for one, had made Rocha feel morally loathsome. He’d always thought of himself as more principled than his siblings. He’d indulged himself as they had, but had thought he was different, that when it really mattered he would stick to his principles in a way that his complacent brothers and sisters never would. But it wasn’t true. When Marcus was kidnapped, Alessandro had suggested the possibility of hiring a hit man, but Rocha had chafed at the suggestion. Hire a murderer? Endorse such an industry? He’d told Alessandro that the country would never move forward if law-abiding citizens made a practice of hiring murderers to kill one another.
But he had done it. He’d hired a murderer. Several of them. He was a man who kept to his principles at the expense of other people’s lives but not his own. Not his lover’s. And now there was nothing to do but watch this worthless, sooty footage of a burning building on the TV along with everyone else.
As the boat rose, Raquel held on, clinging to the railing with everyone else. After each wave, the nose of the boat smacked down with such violence they all crashed against their seats. You know the moon is the reason, an older woman clenching the railing next to Raquel said. The woman began to describe her last boat to the mainland just before a full moon and Raquel nodded politely, only half listening, as she didn’t plan on taking another boat to Boipeba after this one. She wouldn’t be abandoning her exactly. She would just send Marcus instead. He would be able to stand seeing their mother carrying around that dirty coat like a homeless person. She’d send along a new pair of glasses and some fresh clothes and sandals. He would come and decide when it was safe to bring their mother home. It was his turn to make the call. Raquel didn’t want to do it again, not this time.
Look at that! The chatty woman beside her pointed to what looked like another jagged wave until Raquel saw it, a long gray line breaking the surface of the water—the tremendous back of a whale.
Then, just as suddenly as it had risen, it sank again.
João wasn’t hungry.
But his mother had made him coconut bread and insisted.
So he ate for her.
And his mother hovered, brushing the cinder from his hair.
Emma was extracting hair from her brush in the bathroom when she heard Miles on the other side of the door shouting something about Beatriz. She clicked on the bathroom fan to drown out the sound of his voice. Despite her efforts to be frank with him, he’d refused to leave Brazil or get another room. On long runs, she had admired Miles’s ability to continue at any cost. His determination was contagious, perhaps never more so than now, in Brazil. With Miles unwilling to budge, Emma had decided her only course was to leave herself. There was no shortage of hotels in Salvador. Once the hospital released Marcus this afternoon, they would simply head to another.
This morning, however, she was still confined to this situation and to the sound of Miles shouting outside the bathroom. Even with the fan on, she could hear him saying something about a fire. At the word dead, she couldn’t help but pause and put down her hairbrush, placing it next to the soap.
She heard him say burned.
She heard obliterated.
Room down around her.
She heard gone. In the hotel lobby on the TV.
Heard enough that she emerged from the bathroom to find the door of the room ajar and the TV on. On the screen a smoky hole was smoldering where a building had been. Tourists and islanders were crowding together in front of it, coughing in the smoke. A helicopter landed as a message in bold white letters scrolled across the bottom of the TV screen: MISSING WRITER BEATRIZ YAGODA FOUND DEAD IN FIRE ON THE ISLAND OF BOIPEBA.
The message scrolled across a second time, a third, and Emma kept on reading, translating it over and over in her head. She was still fixated on the words replaying at the bottom of the screen when she heard Miles speaking to someone just outside the door.
Emma, can you tell this man he’s got the wrong room?
At the sound of her name, Emma finally turned from the news and saw Marcus standing transfixed in the open doorway, watching the TV. She registered what was happening but so had Miles, who seized Marcus’s T-shirt with both fists and began to shake him so hard Marcus shouted in pain and tried to cover the bandaged side of his head. Emma yelled at Miles to stop and lunged to pull him off, the news playing on behind them, seeming to get louder, devouring the room and then the hallway as Marcus twisted free, and Emma ran after him, apologizing, and he said, Please. My mother is dead. Please leave me alone.
Whether you’re listening or not, my friends, whether a beautiful sentence moves you or leaves you cold, Brazilian literature has lost a piece of its soul today. Beatriz Yagoda may have gambled too much and hid from her own children, but she wrote like the room was on fire, and so it went down. At nine this morning she burned to death in a hotel on Boipeba. The flames, my friends, were started by a cigar left burning in her room. Smokers, take heed.
Emma kept to her hotel room in case Marcus called her back. She’d left him message after message until his voice mail was full. Raquel had called once with the details of the funeral but that was all.
Miles had finally flown back to Pittsburgh.
Her author was gone.
Besides the occasional shout on the street or a few fleeting samba notes from a passing car, nothing broke the impersonal quiet of her hotel room. As the long minutes of the humid afternoon turned into the even longer minutes of evening, she got increasingly restless. She looked up flights online but bought none of them. She went out for food, returned, and still the hours until the funeral dripped by like a leak from a faucet.
It was dark by the time she began flipping through her notebook, trying to make out what she had intended in the sentences she’d scratched out and scribbled again. After all that had happened in t
he past two days, much of her own handwriting had become mysterious to her.
With her translations, she’d learned to type for long stretches without ever looking at the screen. She’d keep her face turned to Beatriz’s book, propped open beside her on the desk, or she’d stare out the window and trust her fingers to key in the words as they occurred to her. When she looked back over what she’d typed, there was a kind of magic in seeing that her hands had indeed accurately translated what had come into her mind into sentences on the screen. There was no reason to believe that her fingers wouldn’t comply with a similar kind of magic if the words she was typing up happened to be her own.
And if her fingers failed to comply, if what she wrote wasn’t worth typing up, who would ever know? She was alone with all the hours of her life.
Transcribe: From the Latin prefix trans + scribere. 1. To write something anew and fully, as with a score of music for a new instrument. 2. To convert a written work in such a way that it alters the expectations of others and/or oneself, often requiring the abandonment of such expectations entirely. See also: transform, transgress, translate.
Rocha arranged the reception, a private one, to follow the larger gathering the Ministry of Culture had put together for the public in the Biblioteca Nacional. For the literati, Rocha ordered a full spread from Antiquarius and spoke with the chef directly to ensure that everything would be impeccable, the best trays of meats and fruits, the most expertly prepared cuts of sashimi, a few salads. He chose the flowers himself, small-mouthed vases of cream-colored lilies, and made sure they were arranged with subtlety, not just shoved in with some ferns and other filler.
Every night before the funeral he had woken up and seen the ashes playing across the ceiling above his bed and across the walls, on the mirror in the bathroom. Beyond the phone calls for the funeral preparations, he had barely spoken. A 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?
If João had smelled the fire sooner.
If he had stepped out earlier, seen the smoke blowing over the bougainvillea.
If the hose in the garden had been longer.
If the island had owned a proper fire truck, if Mario had bought an extinguisher, if anyone had had the special fire clothes and mask that made it possible to go in and pull a person out of a flaming room.
If they hadn’t used so much bamboo for the chairs and also the dressers.
If they had considered how quickly bamboo lit and could fill up a room with smoke.
If she had stayed longer.
If she had insisted her mother also board the boat.
If she had forced her.
If she had been more forgiving.
If the motor had sputtered.
If she hadn’t stared so long at that awful coat.
If she had opened her eyes in the dark and gazed back at her mother.
If she’d admitted how good it felt to lie there and feel her mother present, watching.
If there had been anything left of her mother after the fire.
If the firemen had found even some vestige of her teeth.
If Raquel had turned around and waved again, harder.
If she had called out as the boat drew away, had left her mother curious about what it was she’d shouted from the water.
If the waves had been so strong that they couldn’t leave.
If the whale.
If the boat.
If the rain.
If we honor what we can recall by accepting that we cannot change it, the rabbi was saying. Or he was making more sense than that but Emma couldn’t follow. Her mind felt blanched and she was uneasy. She kept feeling someone watching her and with an unsettling intensity, the way Beatriz had watched her if Emma was walking toward her from the other side of a room.
But that couldn’t be. Her author was dead, ashes. Someone at the funeral just happened to study people with a similarly electric gaze. Emma looked around to see who that person could be, but all the heads around her seemed to be lowered for the Kaddish.
She lowered her head as well and forced herself to focus on the words, though she knew them. Yit’gadal, v’yitkadash, she murmured along in Hebrew with the elderly relatives who had arrived early and taken up the entire front row. Raquel had refused to ask any of these older aunts and uncles for the ransom money, but she’d invited them to the funeral, and all of them had come, pulling Raquel and Marcus into their arms like children. Once these elderly aunts and uncles were assembled in the front row, it felt right for them to be there, their gravelly voices forming a chorus for the mourner’s prayer.
Emma didn’t understand why Raquel’s loud and hairy boss had also filed into the front row. The relatives she understood—they were the ones who would eventually lie next to Beatriz and her parents and brother, here in the Jewish communal section of Cemitério do Cajú. If only they had called them earlier.
If Beatriz had gone to them for money instead of Flamenguinho.
If the brother Beatriz had spoken of visiting in this cemetery hadn’t died at seventeen. If he’d known her as only a sibling can after so many years.
If Emma had known her at all.
If she’d asked better questions.
If she’d asked fewer.
If she’d sat, just once, with Beatriz on the balcony without getting so nervous she had to string a new curtain of literary inquiries between them.
If everyone will please turn to page one hundred and ten.
To page one twenty-three.
If you will please give your attention to Raquel, who has chosen a passage from—
If you are familiar with my mother’s second novel, you may know this scene. It appears just after the mayors die and the butterflies begin to arrive with duller wings.
For years, Raquel began to read, they came in bright abundance, forming clouds over the riverbank. Tourists would arrive by the boatload to behold them in all their orange and pink-tipped magnificence. But then one mayor was undone in his own bed, the other chopped to pieces, and when the butterflies arrived it was not quite as before. First the orange of their wings deepened to a glistening black. Then the pink along the edges reddened to a muddy brown. They began to arrive in ever more colorless clouds and the tourists would not have it. They called them moths and left bewildered.
Only the locals, she read on, continued to call them butterflies, to hold out their arms for them to flutter against their skin. As for the darkening of their wings, along the Amazon they called it the ink blue of the eyes of infants, of the river at six in the evening in the mist after a monsoon.
Raquel paused to steady her hands so the page would stop trembling. But she had waited a beat too long. She’d lost her place on the page. As she searched for where she’d stopped, it occurred to her how many seconds like this were to come, her mother gone and nowhere left to look for her except in a fog of sentences like this one.
In the mist after a monsoon, Raquel repeated, looking out at the crowd that had come to mourn her mother, all of them watching her, waiting for her to read on. Only when her gaze stopped at the second row did she realize who she was looking for, the one person who would know the degree to which her hands had begun to tremble, and also the next words she needed. Emma mouthed the phrase where Raquel had left off and finding it, Raquel continued, reading well past where she’d originally planned to stop, to show that she could. Then she read on, even further, until it was no longer about anyone at the funeral or even about her mother. It was only about the sentences, her breath matching the give-and-take of the cadence, the rhythm filling her chest, and for the first time in days she did not feel empty.
By the time she sat down next to Marcus, she was breathless. Several aunts leaned over to murmur about how beautifully she’d read and she thanked them, her face wet, until Marcus took her hand and she let herself collapse a little against his shoulder, though there was not much of him to collapse against.
He’d become so bony. Beneath his suit, his chest was sunken like a ship, and leaning into him, Raquel could not remember why it had felt so necessary for her brother to be equally alone.
Up at the podium, the rabbi who none of them knew reached the end of the final prayer and the dam gave way. The whole river of mourners began to surge toward them. Raquel told Marcus that they would drown if they didn’t head directly to the black sedans Rocha had rented for the procession.
Unless, she said, there’s someone you want to ask to ride with us.
Marcus hung his head and said he could think of only one person. I’ll ask her, Raquel offered. Just go to the car. We’ll meet you there.
The semester began. The stacks of syllabi. A student arrived with his T-shirt on inside out. Another walked in chewing gum with her mouth open and with such vigor it required every muscle in her face.
Only this semester the heat stayed and stayed. The leaves remained on the trees.
After her fifth class, Emma found a small yellow lizard crawling into her coffee cup. The next week, her office door jammed from the humidity and she got stuck inside, knocking on her own door until a passing colleague yanked the knob and freed her. The next morning the rusted knob fell off in her hand.
At the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, there was little that Emma could predict with any consistency. In that regard, it did not feel at odds with the rest of her life. Her parents kept telling her it wasn’t enough, that she couldn’t live this way in her thirties, on her own in a dangerous country, teaching for so little money she had to rent a room from some musicologist named Esmeralda.
However, Emma only stayed at Esmeralda’s when she was writing. Other nights she stayed with Marcus or they took a bus up the coast. At the present moment, for example, they were sitting in some prongs of palm shade studying an older woman who was not the right size or shape to be Beatriz but who was writing in the sand with her toe, stepping closer to the water with each word. As they watched, the waves began to foam around the woman’s ankles yet she kept on composing, wading in and in, her words beginning to dissolve as she wrote them. Surely she would be reasonable and stop when the water met her knees.