Free The Death of a Much Travelled Woman by Barbara Wilson Page B

stopped.
    There were now more blue plaques to women than ever.

Belladonna
I.
It is over a year since I spent the day with you on your lovely island. I remember it all very vividly …
    —Georgia O’Keefe,
    letter to her hosts on Maui
    F OR A LONG TIME I turned up my nose at Hawaii. The very name reeked of junior-high talent shows where pimpled hula dancers tried to keep their cellophane skirts up and their flowery wreaths from falling into their eyes. Luaus with barbecued pigs, tiny paper umbrellas decorating tall, lethally sweet cocktails, muscular tanned youths with surfboards, Waikiki, Gidget, Magnum P.I.—those are the images that came to mind when people said, “You’ve never been to Hawaii? You’ve never been to Hawaii, and you’ve been to Patagonia and the Ivory Coast?”
    But that’s the point. We who call ourselves travellers are snobs of the worst kind. We would much prefer to be wildly uncomfortable on the cushionless seats of a bus in Bangladesh or a train traversing the Gobi Desert, moving slowly through some strange desolate landscape and either feeling boiling hot or freezing cold, with nothing to eat, no toilet paper, and nothing to read, surrounded by hostile people who don’t speak our language and perhaps want to convert us to their religion or to steal all our money, than to do anything so gauche as to enjoy ourselves in any sort of tropical paradise, particularly if it means that another Westerner, a mere tourist, might be anywhere in sight.
    Luisa Montiflores, the gloomy and recondite Uruguayan novelist, was not of the same opinion. She had just spent three “cold like hell” winter months as a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto and wanted to recuperate on the Hawaiian islands. And she wanted me, as her translator, “my friend ,” to join her.
    Luisa had once been my protégé, but over the years, the situation had reversed itself. I had been a lone voice championing her difficult, deconstructionist novels, sending sample translations of her work to publishers and writing articles that proclaimed her originality. Now I had lost interest in her work, just as academics and the literary elite were discovering her peculiar blend of poetry and self-pity. Although I suspected that hardly a thousand people in the English-speaking world could have read her work, Luisa attracted honors, grants, stipends, symposia, and residencies all over the world.
    “All, all I owe to you,” she often said. “I am loyal, you see,” and to prove it she frequently stipulated that a translator’s salary be part of her agreements. From Stockholm to Adelaide we had travelled the globe together, and if it had truly been my goal in life to be Luisa’s literary factotum, I’d have been ecstatic.
    We had just been to the University of Hawaii in Honolulu where Luisa gave a seminar talk on the new Latin American fiction, which was, strangely enough, only about her fiction. Now we were in Maui, where Luisa planned to stay a month to put the final touches on her latest novel, and talk to me about translating it. We were staying with Claudie, a friend of Luisa’s who was an art dealer in Lahaina.
    “When Gloria de los Angeles goes to give a talk, they do not ask her about my work. Why do they ask me about her ?” Luisa glared at me. “I still do not understand, Cassandra, how you can also translate her. That idiot and her magic realism. I spit on her magic realism.”
    “You’re writing for different audiences,” I soothed her. “Believe me, your work and hers cannot even be discussed in the same breath. Do you think the most brilliant minds of Spanish language departments are impressed by her writing? I can tell you, Luisa: they laugh at her. Simply laugh at her and shrug their shoulders. But when they say Luisa Montiflores, they bow their heads in respect.”
    We were sitting on a terrace overlooking Claudie’s magnificent garden of ginger, hibiscus, and trailing orchids in the warm, sweet-scented