You Came Back

Chapter One: The Party Trick

The rooftop in Graça smelled of grilled sardines and the neighbour's jasmine, and Amara Diallo was being admired again.

"Say it again," said Rui, leaning across the table with his glass tipped dangerously. "The word. The one you did before."

"Which word?"

"The one with the— " He made a gesture near his throat, as though fluency were something you could sculpt with your fingers. "Saudade. No. Desassossego. Say desassossego."

Amara said it. She let the sibilants land where they belonged, gave the vowels their proper Lisbon slouch, and Rui slapped the table as if she had produced a coin from behind his ear.

"Perfect," he said. "Perfect Portuguese. Nuno, she speaks better than my mother."

"She speaks better than all of us," said Nuno Fonseca, and he reached over and squeezed the back of Amara's neck, warm, proprietary, affectionate. "She corrects my subtitles."

"Somebody has to," Amara said, and they laughed, and the evening rolled on without her.

That was the trick of these dinners: she could step out of them entirely while remaining perfectly present. Her hands kept working — filling a glass, passing the bread, brushing crumbs into her palm — and some part of her stood by the parapet at the roof's edge, looking down at the pale wash of streetlight on the tiled facades, listening to a woman four floors below call a child inside for the third and final time.

Amara was twenty-nine. She had lived in Lisbon for five years. She translated novels from French into Portuguese and from Portuguese into French for the agency of Catherine Bouvier, which was small, absurdly prestigious, and located in two rooms above a shop in Paris that sold nothing but pens. She had a good chair, a good lamp, a good ear. She had a boyfriend who was a documentary filmmaker and who liked to say, at parties, that he had met her when she was interpreting for a Malian director and had fallen in love with her voice before he had properly seen her face.

It was a nice story. She had heard it perhaps two hundred times. It was beginning to feel like a coat that someone else had bought for her, in her size, in a colour she would not have chosen.

Orlando Grilo, Nuno's producer, arrived late with a bottle of wine and the particular energy of a man who has spent all day arguing with a broadcaster. He kissed Amara on both cheeks and dropped into the chair beside her.

"Has he told you?" Orlando said.

"Told me what?"

"Fine cut in six weeks. Six." Orlando poured. "We showed twelve minutes to the festival people. The Cape Verdean grandmother, the boys on the roof in Cova da Moura, the girl who does hair in her kitchen — they wept, Amara. Actual tears in an actual meeting room, which in this industry is a religious event."

"Congratulations," she said.

"It's your film too, you know."

Amara looked at him. "It really isn't."

"Nuno says you've been an enormous— " Orlando waved his hand, searching. "A sounding board. A conscience."

"That's a very cheap job title."

Orlando laughed, delighted, and told her she was terrible, and turned to argue with Rui about a director they both despised.

Later, in the bathroom, Amara stood with her hands under the tap longer than she needed to and looked at herself in the small mirror with the chipped corner. Her hair was straightened, blown out that afternoon by a woman in Anjos who charged too much and gossiped in Kriolu with her cousin while she worked. It shone. It swung when Amara turned her head. It cost her four hours a month and a low, private ache she had never bothered to name.

In Dakar her mother would have looked at that hair and said nothing at all, which was Khadija Diallo's most eloquent register.

Amara dried her hands and went back out and was charming for another hour and a half.

---

The calls home were on Wednesdays, at eight in the evening Lisbon time, seven in Dakar. She had made the appointment years ago because appointments survive where intentions do not.

The laptop chimed. The picture came up crooked, as it always did, because her father propped the tablet against the fruit bowl and refused instruction.

"Naka nga def?" Amara said, and the Wolof came out of her like a held breath let go.

"Maa ngi fi rekk." Her mother's face slid into frame, then out again. "Ibrahima. Move it. She's looking at the ceiling."

"She likes the ceiling," said her father. "It's a good ceiling. I painted it."

"In 2004."

"Good work lasts."

And there he was: Ibrahima Diallo, seventy-one, in the blue boubou he wore in the evenings, his reading glasses pushed up into his grey hair, a book face-down on the table beside him because he could not bear to close a book on its spine and could not bear to lose his place either. He had taught French literature in Saint-Louis for thirty-four years. He had a voice like a hand on your shoulder.

"Sama doom," he said. "Tell me about the Congolese."

"He's difficult."

"Good books are difficult."

"He writes sentences that go on for a page and a half and then he ends a chapter with three words. In French it sounds like a drumbeat. In Portuguese it sounds like a man giving up."

"So don't let him give up."

"That's the whole job, Papa."

"That's the whole job," he agreed, pleased with her, pleased with himself, pleased with the ceiling. "Come and look at the bougainvillea. It has decided to be magnificent. It has ambitions to cover the whole wall."

He carried the tablet out into the courtyard and Amara watched the picture jolt and blur and resolve into a wall of impossible magenta lit by the bare bulb over the door, and she felt her throat close.

Then Bineta appeared, twenty-four, hair wrapped in a scarf, a highlighter still in her hand.

"I'm going to fail cardiology," she announced.

"You are not going to fail cardiology."

"The professor asked me a question today and I said something so stupid I want to change my name."

"What did you say?"

Bineta told her, and Amara laughed, and Bineta's face collapsed into a grin she was clearly trying to prevent, and for eleven minutes they were sisters and not two people on either side of an ocean managing each other's expectations.

"Are you coming for Tabaski?" Bineta asked, at the end. Casually. Which meant it had been discussed.

"I'll try."

"You said that last year."

"I have a book due."

"You always have a book due."

"Bineta."

"I'm just saying what's true." Bineta shrugged, and turned the tablet so their mother came back into frame, and Khadija looked at her elder daughter for a moment with an expression Amara could never read across a screen — could barely read in a room.

"Eat properly," Khadija said. "You have a face like a knife."

"Yes, Yaay."

"And put oil in that hair. You've cooked it."

The call ended. Amara sat in the blue light of the closed laptop. Somewhere below, a tram ground around the corner of Rua da Graça with its long metal complaint. She had the strange, familiar sensation of being handed back to herself in the wrong order — a jumble of parts that did not fit as neatly as they had an hour before.

Nuno came in with two cups of tea and found her sitting in the dark.

"Family call?"

"Family call."

He put the cup down and kissed the top of her head. "You're always sad afterwards."

"I'm not sad."

"You get quiet."

"Quiet isn't sad."

"With you it is," he said, and she loved him for noticing and resented him for being right and did not know how to hold both of those things at once, so she drank her tea.

---

Catherine Bouvier called at eight the next morning, which meant something was wrong or something was wonderful.

"Amara. Are you sitting?"

"I'm always sitting. It's the job."

"Mabika is on the Deux Rives shortlist."

Amara set down her coffee. Célestin Mabika's novel — the one with the sentences like rivers, the one about a metalworker's house in Lubumbashi and the four generations that fought inside it — was three hundred and ninety pages of the hardest, most beautiful French she had ever handled. She was at page three hundred and eleven of the Portuguese.

"They announced?"

"An hour ago. Bertrand at the Portuguese house is losing his mind — he wants to publish within days of the prize announcement, not weeks, days, because he is a vulture and I say that with love. Which means I need your manuscript on the twenty-eighth."

"The twenty-eighth is in eleven days."

"I am aware of the calendar, my dear. I invented it."

"Catherine."

"Listen to me." Catherine's voice dropped into the register she used for real things, the register that had, over four years, made Amara willing to do impossible amounts of work for her. "If he wins, that book is translated into thirty languages and every single one of those translators will be a name in a database. Yours will be the first out. People will read your Portuguese and think that is what Mabika sounds like. Forever. Do you understand what I am handing you?"

Amara looked at the wall above her desk, where she had pinned a photograph of the courtyard in Dakar, the bougainvillea in it still modest, still deciding.

"The twenty-eighth," she said.

"That's my girl."

After she hung up, Amara opened the file and read the last paragraph she had translated the night before, and it was wrong, and she knew exactly how to fix it, and the knowing lit her up the way nothing else in her life reliably did. She wrote for eleven hours. She forgot to eat. When Nuno came home she recited a solved sentence to him with her hands shaking from coffee, and he said, "You're incredible," and meant it, and she believed him.

She would think about that day often afterwards, and about how happy she had been, and about how the phone had not yet rung.