The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

‘I did, thanks.’

‘For me, the worst is the plane trip. I enjoy flying, but not like that.’

‘Yes, the turbulence midway is awful. Everybody told me to avoid travelling here on a full stomach.’

The woman smiled.

‘How do you want to do this?’

‘Do you mind if I record the interview, Miss Barbosa?’

‘No. And call me Elizabeth.’

They sat on the stools. Anita took a long sip of the coffee. It was really delicious. She looked for a place at the table for the mug, but there were just too many books piled there (good, neat, evenly spaced piles, she noted). Slowly, she put her mug on the floor, taking care not to set it on the red rug, which, upon close examination, seemed more a pinkish rag, clean but very old and trodden on by many feet and shoes. She took a finger-sized stick out of her jeans pocket, pressed a button and checked the tiny screen. Then she placed the stick on top of one of the book piles.

‘Miss Barbosa, why are you here?’ Anita asked.

‘Are you sure this will work from that distance?’ Miss Barbosa pointed to the small recorder. ‘And call me Elizabeth, please. I hate formalities.’

Anita smiled. ‘Okay. The recorder will work fine, don’t worry.’

‘I’m not worried.’ Elizabeth shrugged. She sipped from her mug and started talking. ‘It wasn’t a big deal in the beginning. Very early in my life I learned to live with the unexpected. My mum used to say that things never happen the way you expect them to – but they often come out better than you might imagine.’

‘You only published two books,’ Anita said. ‘A novel and an essay. Neither of them have anything to do with… here.’

‘That is not true,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Did you read my essay?’

‘Yes.’ Anita had done her homework; ‘it was a very interesting take on Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.’

‘Not only that,’ Elizabeth countered; ‘it was an evolution of the concept, so to speak, regarding the ethical eye of the beholder. Camus assumes the burden of Sisyphus can’t be removed from him, and that must account for something, so he ponders that Sisyphus strives to become a better man by sheer effort of will, accepting his fate. First I tried to analyse this in the light of Buddhism, which makes sense, but only if you want to agree with Camus all the way. I always thought that somehow the old Algerian was being ironic. The ultimate existentialist, maybe.’

‘Yes, and that’s the part I didn’t really get. You seemed to make the point that the rock is not a rock, just the dark side of Sisyphus.’

‘Not the dark side. The rock is his shadow. Are you familiar with the Jungian term?’

This homework Anita hadn’t done. She shook her head.

‘That’s all right. Nobody these days is very familiar with Jung. Or even Camus. I’m surprised you came all the way down south just to interview me about it.’

‘I just want to understand you. It’s hard for me to understand how you could have dropped everything in your life to live here.’

‘You say here like it is a bad word. I suppose young people always think their way is best.’ Elizabeth sipped her coffee. ‘Maybe it is, but that’s what you are. I’m cut of a different cloth. Maybe it’s my age, the way I was raised. Anyway, one day I woke up and found out that I didn’t really have anything to lose. I had lost my family long ago due to my… proclivities, as we used to say then. And what are material things after all? I was tired of living in a bubble.’

‘But you lived in São Paulo. One of the biggest cities on Earth. A megalopolis.’

‘And a bubble nevertheless. Just a very big one.’

‘But why here? And by here, I didn’t mean anything nasty. Sorry if I didn’t make myself clear.’

‘Here’s the thing,’ Elizabeth carried on, as if she hadn’t heard Anita’s apologies, or hadn’t cared. ‘When you’re safely ensconced in a bubble, you are in a comfort zone. Inside this zone, you only see and hear what you want to. You learn not to hear police sirens in the middle of the night, or junkies shouting in pain, or a woman crying “thief” or “rape”. You manage to convince yourself that you don’t have anything to do with all of that, and that’s all right, because it’s a coping mechanism, it’s how you live without getting crazy. Or without getting too crazy, at least.

‘I decided to move here because I could live a quieter life. And because I could face my shadow. My other half. The one that screams bloody murder, literally.’

Having said that, she suddenly stopped talking. But this brusque pause didn’t seem to be for dramatic effect. Instead, she got up and went over to the stove.

‘What is this interview for, again? I’m sure you told me in your e-mail, but I honestly can’t remember, sorry.’

Anita almost felt sorry too. But she was used to being questioned. And she was sure that was the case now too.

‘It’s for my doctorate thesis on forgotten Brazilian female writers,’ she told her the cover story. ‘I already profiled the other living writers on my list. You are the last one.’

Elizabeth laughed out loud.

‘Good to know I’m a living writer,’ she said. ‘For a second you had me confused.’

‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘Nah, I’m being facetious. Are you hungry? Let’s have some dinner, shall we? It’ll be dark soon, and we sleep early in the wilderness.’

*

Anita hadn’t realized how hungry she was. She ate heartily the chicken stew with rice and beans and started feeling drowsy right after wiping the plate. Elizabeth showed her the guest room. There was a guest room, incredible as it might seem, but Anita chided herself for being so prejudiced in her thinking. Not every house in Manaus had a guest room. Damn, her childhood home didn’t have one; who was she to think less of Elizabeth because she chose to