The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (30 page)

The convent school of
Lovers and Virgins
was a thing of the past now, and I was deep into Chapter Three, making notes and getting the feel of the thing. I could see that I was going to have trouble with some of the terminology if I took it on as a translation project.

After her wild ride across the pampas, Maria dismounted and handed the reins to the stable hand. He must be new, she thought. For he did not call her señorita and keep his eyes lowered as most of them did. Instead, he faced her boldly and, with a smile that showed white teeth, murmured, “It is clear that the young lady is an excellent rider, even without a saddle.”

She slapped his face. How dare he address her, much less make a comment like that? She was sixteen and no child, though she had spent her life being taught by nuns. She knew what he meant. Ladies did not ride without a saddle. That he should even be imagining…

More of this mental and physical flouncing about followed before Maria returned abruptly, accepted her stable hand’s apologies and began to help him groom the horse.

It was clear where all this was leading, if not in this chapter, then soon. The horse box was reeking of animal sweat and young lust. But the sexual antics of Maria and the stable boy, at least in terms of vocabulary, were not my concern. It was all the unfamiliar and arcane equestrian terms that were throwing me. The author had probably dug them up in some eighteenth-century volume in an obscure private library in a
hacienda
in deepest Venezuela. I had thought my greatest problem with this book was going to be nun speak; now I could see it might be horse talk.

I flipped open
Bashō in Lima
and began to read it slowly, the way it wanted to be read. Now this would be a challenge to translate, a lovely project full of mystery and poetry and deep feeling. I could feel the language of the book easing my heartbeat, rearranging my brain cells.
These
were the kinds of books that should be published, that should be in the world. No one would probably buy it, it’s true. It did not have the words NEW INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER screaming off its pages as did
Lovers and Virgins
. But if I didn’t write a favorable reader’s report, it would end up in Simon’s trash bin, like so many other novels from other countries that publishers and agents with great hopes tried to market to the English-reading public.

When I first arrived at the city of dreams, the city of my youth, the city of unknown possibilities…

Then all that caffeine must have kicked in, because suddenly I was impatient with this modern-day Bashō. Wasn’t this text a bit precious, a little self-indulgent? I pretended I was Simon, asking: “But what is the book
about
, Cassandra?”

For an hour or so I went back and forth between the two books, from time to time glancing out the plate-glass windows onto the
piazza
. As the tide receded and the stones of the
piazza
reappeared, the reflection of the basilica vanished. The sun came out, though the mist still lingered in wisps and streamers. The arcades were filling with those tourists who would not be put off by a touch of damp; they were streaming toward the Palace of the Doges and the basilica, toward the Accademia Museum and the Rialto Bridge. Some were simply streaming in circles, already lost and befuddled.

To my surprise, I saw someone I recognized in the crowd. He stood out because of his height. It was big, blond Gunther making his way through the opposite arcade, his head bent as he struggled to listen to whoever was talking to him on his cell phone. But that wasn’t what made me hastily jam the books back in my satchel, jump up and dash out the café door…It was that Marco was following him.

And Andrew McManus was following Marco.

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Barbara Wilson is the pen name under which Barbara Sjoholm has published the Cassandra Reilly Mysteries and the Pam Nilsen Mysteries.
Gaudí Afternoon
, of the Cassandra Reilly series, won a Lambda Literary Award and a Crime Writers’ Association Award, and was made into a film by the same name. Like her detective Cassandra Reilly, Sjoholm is a translator, but of Norwegian and Danish books. In addition to her fiction and the memoir
Blue Windows
, Sjoholm is the author of the travel books
The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea
,
Incognito Street
, and
The Palace of the Snow Queen
. Her essays have appeared in the
American Scholar
,
Harvard Review
, the
New York Times
,
Smithsonian
, and Slate, among other publications.

For more about Barbara Sjoholm, please visit
www.barbarasjoholm.com
.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgements

The following stories first appeared, with minor changes, in anthologies or other media as noted:

“Belladonna” first appeared in
Women on the Case
, edited by Sara Paretsky, Delacorte Press, 1996

“The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman” first appeared in
Womansleuth IV
, edited by Irene Zahava, Crossing Press, 1991

“An Expatriate Death” first appeared in
Out for Blood
, edited by Victoria Brownworth, Third Side Press, Chicago, 1995

“Murder at the International Feminist Book Fair” first appeared in
Reader, I Murdered Him
, edited by Jen Green, The Women’s Press, London, 1989

“Mi Novelista” appeared in serialized form on
biztravel.com
in 1997

“The Theft of the Poet” first appeared in
A Woman’s Eye
, edited by Sara Peretzky, Delacorte Press, 1991

“Wie Bitte?” first appeared in
Brought to Book
, edited by Penny Smith, The Women’s Press, London, 1998

Copyright © 1998 by Barbara Wilson

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

978-1-4804-5520-7

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com