Idra Novey - Ways to Disappear

Did you click on the link yet? brazil.usembassy.gov. GO NOW. This writer, her children — they are strangers. What you’re doing down there is not your life.

For breakfast, they ordered omelets and slices of guava. When room service knocked, Marcus wrapped a towel around his waist and sauntered to the door with the ease of someone who was not unaccustomed to receiving his breakfast in this manner.

When she woke earlier, Emma had given in to the impulse to check her email while Marcus slept on beside her. She’d tried for a few minutes to just lie there, half-dozing, listening to the rattle of vendors’ carts assembling along the beach. She was sorry she hadn’t tried a little longer. Having seen her email, there was no postponing her dread of reckoning with Miles.

Unless she was willing to be cruel and switch hotels.

Divino! Marcus exclaimed over the toast, wiping some crumbs from his mouth. He reached down into his backpack lying open beside the bed and Emma assumed he was reaching for another condom, but he pulled out the new edition of Have You Tasted the Butterflies .

Did you see this at the airport? I’ve never finished any of my mother’s books. He handed Emma the new edition. I knew her books were all in the apartment, but so was she. It never felt right to read her when I could hear her in the next room. Or maybe I wasn’t ready to know what she said in them. He shrugged. Or it was just laziness.

Emma touched the book’s sleek new cover, its austere fork and knife. Even her author’s work had become unfamiliar to her now.

I had no idea so much of it was about adultery, Marcus said.

Well, and also the dream lives of pigeons.

That part I couldn’t follow. He pulled the sheet up as if he’d gotten cold. Will you read it? he asked. From the part about the pigeons?

Still naked, her fingertips sticky with guava, Emma began to murmur the words for Marcus that his mother had written before he was born. At first, she spoke the words so softly that she could barely hear herself, and Marcus drew closer.

With each sentence, she sank further into the words and her voice began to rise. She’d lived with these descriptions for so long, had mulled over them as she drove through the snow and while she brushed her teeth.

And wasn’t the splendor of translation this very thing — to discover sentences this beautiful and then have the chance to make someone else hear their beauty who had yet to hear it? To arrive, at least once, at a moment this intimate and singular, which would not be possible without these words arranged in this order on this page?

For 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.

I know that pigeons, in their dreams, are also not unlike the willed slumber of the woman’s husband, who is in someone else’s bed in another part of town. A husband who wants to believe his wife is sleeping soundly in their home, a home he maintains at a distance that is not unlike the distance a pigeon keeps from the meaning of its dreams. Meanings that can be occasionally gathered in the droppings a pigeon may release into the air, the meanings spattered across windshields and tabletops and sometimes on the bald, unsuspecting heads of men.

Ah, that’s my mother’s there. Marcus pressed his lips to Emma’s shoulder and she continued more slowly, more luxuriantly. She’d read an essay by Borges once in which he’d used the word “lujosamente” to describe the voice in Joseph Mardrus’s translation of A Thousand and One Nights.

It is Mardrus’s infidelity, Borges declared, Mardrus’s happy and creative infidelity that must matter to us.

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.